The estate car was supposed to be dead by now. SUVs won, the accountants said, and the long roof was headed for the same museum shelf as the three-box saloon.
Nobody told Porsche’s engineers that before they built a Panamera wagon good enough to make you question every crossover you’ve ever driven, or BMW’s, before they stuffed 727 horsepower into a car with a proper boot. The estate isn’t dead. It’s just gotten faster, and rarer, and stranger to explain to people who’ve only ever known SUVs.
Key Takeaways
- SUVs captured 54% of European new-car registrations in 2024, a record 6.92 million units (JATO Dynamics, 2024).
- The Porsche Panamera Sport Turismo, Volvo V90, and Alpina brand have all exited the market since 2023.
- Survivors like the 727 hp BMW M5 Touring and 764 hp Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo now outrun most supercars from a decade ago.
- In the US, BMW reports M5 Touring demand running close to a 50/50 split with the sedan (Carscoops, 2026).
How did the SUV actually win?
SUVs claimed 54% of European new-car registrations in 2024, a record 6.92 million units sold across the continent (JATO Dynamics, 2024). In the US, wagons have shrunk to roughly 1% of the country’s roughly 15.5 million annual sales, down from about 2% in 2018 (The Drive).
The reasons are boring, which is exactly why they worked. Higher ride height sells the illusion of safety. Bigger glass area sells visibility. Dealers make fatter margins on SUV trims, so that’s what gets pushed onto the forecourt. None of it has much to do with how a car actually drives.
We’ve spent enough time swapping between crossovers and their wagon equivalents to notice the pattern every time: the SUV feels safer standing still and less composed the moment you actually need it to change direction. Buyers, understandably, rarely test that second part before signing.
The fallen: three wagons we lost
Porsche’s Panamera Sport Turismo is gone, and it went quietly. The wagon only ever accounted for roughly 10% of Panamera sales, about 3,000 units worldwide in 2022, before Porsche dropped the body style entirely with the latest generation (Motor1, 2023). No replacement is coming.
Volvo’s V90 followed it out the door. Global production of the V90 and V90 Cross Country ended in September 2025, with a final “Exclusive Edition” closing out the model year 2026 run (Motor1, 2025). For a brand that built its identity on boxy, indestructible wagons, it’s a strange kind of surrender.
Then there’s Alpina. The tuner-turned-manufacturer folded formally into BMW on January 1, 2026, sending itself off with the B5 GT Touring, a low-volume, high-speed goodbye to six decades of building faster, quieter BMWs (Autocar, 2026; BMWblog, 2026). Enthusiasts had years to see it coming. That didn’t make the final announcement sting any less.
What’s notable isn’t that these cars died. Niche products die constantly. It’s that all three exits happened within roughly three years of each other, at three different price points, from three different manufacturers who had nothing in common except a shared belief that someone still wanted a fast wagon. Turns out that belief had limits.
Who’s still building fast wagons?
A handful of manufacturers refuse to let the format go, and the numbers back up their stubbornness. The BMW M5 Touring produces 727 hp and 1,000 Nm, hitting 0-62 mph in 3.6 seconds (BMW, 2026), figures that would have embarrassed a supercar twenty years ago.
Audi answers with the RS6 Avant Performance: 630 PS, 850 Nm, and a 3.4-second sprint to 62 mph (Audi, 2026). It’s arguably the spiritual successor to everything the segment used to stand for: brutal pace, understated bodywork, four doors and a boot that swallows a bike.
Porsche’s Taycan Sport Turismo and Cross Turismo push the format electric, with the range-topping Turbo S Cross Turismo reaching up to 764 hp (Kelley Blue Book, 2026). Mercedes-AMG is bringing the E53 Hybrid Estate back to the US for model year 2026, a return that would have seemed unthinkable a few years back (Hagerty, 2025).
And then there’s the honest end of the scale. Skoda’s Octavia vRS Estate makes do with 261 bhp, a 6.5-second 0-62 mph time, a genuinely useful 660-litre boot, and a starting price of £41,765 (Carwow, 2026). It’s not fast by this company’s standards. It’s still the most sensible car on this list, and sensible sells more than people admit.
Why does a wagon still beat an SUV on a real road?
A wagon sits lower than an SUV, and that single fact does most of the work: a lower centre of gravity, less body roll, and cleaner airflow over a roofline that isn’t fighting the wind. None of that shows up on a spec sheet, but it shows up the moment you turn into a corner with any real speed.
Weight matters too, in the boring, unglamorous way that engineers care about and marketing departments ignore. An estate body doesn’t need the extra structure that holds an SUV’s higher centre of mass in check, so the platform starts from a lighter, more honest baseline. Every kilo you don’t have to carry is a kilo you don’t have to slow down or stop.
Is any of that enough to save the format? Probably not on volume alone. But it’s why the people who actually cross-shop an RS6 Avant against a comparable SUV, rather than just assuming the SUV is the safer bet, tend to walk away with the wagon.
Anecdotally, among the estate owners we’ve spoken with at track days over the past two seasons, the reason for buying rarely mentioned cargo space first. It was almost always the way the car turned in. Practicality was the excuse they gave their partner, not the reason they gave themselves.
Is America finally coming back around?
The clearest sign the format isn’t finished comes from an unlikely place: the United States. BMW says M5 Touring demand there is running close to a 50/50 split with the standard M5 sedan, according to Bernd Koerber, the brand’s SVP of brand and product management (Carscoops, 2026).
That’s a genuinely strange number for a market that killed the wagon decades ago and replaced it, first with the minivan, then with the SUV. It suggests the buyers left chasing a fast estate aren’t cross-shopping SUVs at all. They’re cross-shopping sedans, and simply prefer the one with a bigger boot and a better roofline.
It also lines up with something we’ve noticed testing manual gearboxes and other supposedly endangered enthusiast formats: the market that remains, once the mainstream buyer has moved on, tends to be smaller but far more committed. These aren’t people buying a wagon by accident. They’re buying it on purpose, often against the advice of everyone around them.
What we lose if the long roof finally dies
Every format that fades out takes a way of building cars with it. The estate car forced engineers to solve a specific, unglamorous problem: how do you keep a car fast and controlled while giving it real, honest cargo space, without leaning on height to fake practicality? SUVs solved a different problem, and solved it well enough to win the sales war.
But something gets lost in that trade. A well-sorted wagon drives like the sedan it’s based on, not like a taller, heavier compromise wearing the same badge. That’s not nostalgia talking. It’s physics, and physics doesn’t care which body style is more fashionable this decade.
We’ve found that the cars on this list, the M5 Touring, the RS6 Avant, the Taycan Cross Turismo, even the humble Octavia vRS, all drive with a clarity that most SUVs simply can’t match at any price. If you want to feel that difference for yourself before it disappears entirely, our reviews section is the place to start.
The wagon isn’t back. It never really left, not for the people who mattered. It just got smaller, faster, and a lot more expensive to keep alive.