Extend a sedan’s roof level to the back of the car, put a tailgate where the boot lid was, and the result is a wagon. The gain is not mostly length. It is height and shape: a load bay with vertical sides that reaches the roof, and a flat floor once the rear seats drop. Wheelbase and ride height are unchanged from the sedan, so almost nothing about how the car drives changes either.
Europe still buys them and the German premium brands still build them, most in plain long-roof form, some raised on their springs with body cladding for light rough-road use. The Audi A6 allroad at 5,016 mm is the second kind. The body is being tried again outside its home market too: the Lynk & Co 07 GT is a Chinese plug-in hybrid wagon of 4,846 mm, and Bovensiepen applies the shape to a performance car with the 05 GT. United States sales have been thin since the 1990s, when those buyers moved first to minivans and then to SUVs.
