A different dad's kinda car

Whether you consider station wagons
stylish or not, your last ride
is likely to be in one.

NOT many people still drive stationwagons.
Young guys don’t like the their long shape and most moms prefer the more commanding seat height of a sport utility vehicle (SUV). Some even see station wagons only as a hearse, but as the longest hearse in KZN shows, a stationwagon can give the last ride in stretched style.

Thus the estate, shooting brake and or stationwagon has become the car of choice for the different dad — as the movie Spud testifies.

The 1974 Renault sw from the movie "Spud"

And therein lies its appeal for the man who does not want to conform to the Fortuner-flock — his choice of car says he is not a run-of-the-mill guy.

There is a bonus too. The stationwagon, it turns out, holds a lot of hitherto unsuspected sex appeal … but more about that anon.

The best thing about station wagons is that it gives the space of a load lugger with the handling of a car.

It has handling to boot

It takes a very daring drifter to risk doing a double swerve in an SUV’s without causing a severe, seat-clenching moment. In a stationwagon, you can swerve wildly and still tune the radio at the same time. This came in handy on the road between Vrede and Newcastle.

The A4 Avant swered easily past the piles of
sand and rocks that keep trucks out of Verde.

This road is typical of most backroads in the country. Every few metres a truck’s tyres have hammered a pothole into the tarmac, so that the few cars on the way to the scenic Botha’s Pass must swerve in slow slaloms to avoid a bent rim.

In most other cars, this would mean driving in fourth, but the A4 Avant can do this dance all day without changing down from eighth gear.

The 2.0 TDI is mapped to provide 380Nm of low-down torque from 1 750 rpm and the optional sporty suspension encourages sharper actions.

All those darling little numbers

The views from Botha’s Pass are very pretty, even in the middle of winter, but even prettier is the big Audi’s consumption figure when driven at pothole speeds.

In eighth gear, the A4 Avant stationwagon milked 17,8 kilometre from every litre of 50 ppm diesel and all this with the family’s load piled into the back.
It can do fast too.

A dip on the accelerator will have 125 kW kick in to pass yet another truck scattering shrapnel, with minimum fuss.

Woa, feel the seats man!

The list of extras in the Audi are legion, but for me the single best thing were the front seats. They should be fitted in every aeroplane — I can advice the makers of the seats in the BMW 328i and Jaguar XKR to make like a Chinese car builder just imitate all the measurements in the Audi’s seats.

Even the resident back seat driver, who normally complains about thin cushions and no legroom, reported that the Avant’s seats provides ample support to all the right muscles on a long road.

Note, however, that the rear bench is strictly a two seater, as the large central console takes up all the space where a third passenger’s legs should go.

Further back, the velour-covered luggage floor can be flipped around to become a hard-wearing, easily cleaned tray for muddy things like, ieuw, cycling shoes. (Not that we advice picking up those pedallists. You never know with people who insist on paying more.)

Old Volvo drivers know, stationwagon-driving daddies
are ethe male equivalent of a milf.

No USB port -- wtf!?

One criticism is the complexity of the 3G satnav/entertainment system — like all Audis in this model year the Avant has a jukebox to store songs and can take two SD cards as well as a sim card, but has only a jack for other auxiliaries like an iPod. No USB socket anywhere. Someone should whisper to the slow-moving burocracy in Audi that a USB port is actually the standard nowadays.

And for those less luddite than I, the handbook states that the “UMTS module of the Bluetooth car phone online enables drivers to navigate on the basis of realistic Google Earth images in addition to high-resolution aerial and satellite images, photos, terrain information, road and street names and business listings."
I did not have the right phone, it seems.

Quo vadis Audi, Q7 or Avant?

With sales of station wagons dwindling and sales of the higher-seated SUVs just going, erm, higher, one can ask why manufacturers keep on making these long, low-slung big-assed sedans?

The answer lies in a stationwagon’s secret sex appeal.

My partner, long spoiled by a succession of test cars, had three words to describe a guy in a station wagon: “solid dad material”.
This is the male equivalent of being a milf but never you mind. After a certain age, that’s about as much as a man can hope to get from his car.