When crossovers flourish and almost all wagons are luxury models, this practice seems to be fading.
Some time ago I had to get a ton of new picket fencing for my yard. There was only one problem: I didn’t have a truck and I wasn’t going to spend money to rent one.
What I did have was a friend with a Peugeot 505 station wagon or three, and on that particular day I could borrow one of them.
The Peugeot 505 I chose from his rental lot was a 1992 DL trim decorated with some mildew and with 231,000 miles on the clock, making it one of just about the last 505s sold in North America, and perhaps among the highest-mileage examples by that point as well. The other two 505s in his “rental lot” were the SW8 models, which stood for station wagon and the passenger capacity thanks to a third row seat in the back. But that third row in the SW8 did not stow away completely into the floor, making the wagon less than ideal for transporting large cargo even with the middle row of seats folded down.
The 1992 505 DL, on the other hand, was game for that sort of thing.
This Peugeot “rental lot” had a number of choices.
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I planned ahead, measuring the picket fencing that turned out to be eight feet long, in theory making it a bit of a snug fit. Nervously measuring the fencing and the interior of the Peugeot half a dozen times confirmed this. Still, it didn’t feel like it would work.
Another problem was the fact that I needed to fit 12 pieces, preferably all in one trip. The 505 had a roof rack but no crossbars, closing the option that I wasn’t enthused about anyway.
The 505, in case you’re unfamiliar, was Peugeot’s most popular seller in its time in the US, which stretched from the 1960s to 1991. The model arrived to replace another popular model, the 504 sedan and wagon duo, just as the 1980s were getting rolling, and didn’t leave for quite some time. The station wagon came on the scene in 1982 in short wheelbase form, making it one of the more cavernous options in Europe at the time, though nowhere as vast as some of the American wagons of the day. But after all, it was a midsize car by US standards, so Peugeot was quite content to go up against Volvo and the German marques in this segment.
With a PRV V6 on the menu, the 505 sedan could claim to go up against a number of heavier challengers from Team Germany, at least on paper, while the station wagon was confined to inline-fours. But its trump card against the Germans was that it was noticeably larger than the W123 and W124 Mercedes wagons.
The DL trim was my chariot of choice that day since the back seats could actually fold down perfectly flat.
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With a few creaks and rattles that confirmed its high mileage, the 505 DL I chose offered surprisingly nimble steering and decent acceleration, even though I was careful about pushing it on the interstate just to get to Lowe’s. But faced with an empty interstate, the wagon seemed eager to make its way up to 75 mph and stay there, while offering plenty of wind and transmission noise. Even the rear wiper worked.
The 505 model ended up being a double-edged sword for Peugeot: It was a popular model through the 1980s, but it was also just about the only model in the second half of the decade, after the 504 and the 604 had left the lineup. With no direct successor in sight, Peugeot began to import the smaller 405 sedan and station wagon starting in 1989, but couldn’t get its 505 buyers into the newer model. By that time sales had shrunk quite a bit, and Peugeot was facing renewed competition from Japanese models, not to mention the Volvo 240, 740, and 940 wagons almost simultaneously.
By the last few years of its stateside presence, Peugeot’s lineup seemed doomed as the company chose not to import other models that it offered in Europe. And the 405 sedan and wagon weren’t enough, recording only a few thousand sales each in the years they were offered here.
The 505 still felt nimble in city traffic, and on the interstate it wanted to sit at 75, even though it took a while to get up to that speed.
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The 505 DL looked like a relic from another era in a Lowe’s parking lot filled with pickups, and predictably received a couple of wary looks from “truckers.” It was just about the oldest car in the parking lot, and also the only station wagon there.
With the picket fencing purchased and loaded onto a flat cart, it was the moment of truth: Would the station wagon swallow all that fencing?
With the rear seats folded down and the backs of the front seats moved up a bit, the 505 accepted all the picket fencing with ease, to my surprise, with a couple bystanders staring with interest. Loaded up with the fencing, the chassis of the 505 didn’t seem to mind, offering the same nimble handling as before.
It’s not easy to find a wagon with the interior capacity of the 505 these days, and running through some larger crossover options isn’t much help, as very few would fit 12 pieces of something that’s eight feet long with the middle row folded down. So it’s safe to say this category of station wagon is nearly extinct, necessitating something the size of a full-size SUV to recreate the cargo capacity, with fold-flat second and third rows and a higher load-in height.
The wagon accepted 12 pieces of fencing, with each being 8 feet long. About half of them are in at this point.
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The wagons that are available can seem positively small, including Volvo’s S90 wagon, with interiors that are too luxurious and too fragile to accommodate building materials without getting scuffed. Moreover, the vast majority of the station wagons that are available stateside tend to be luxury models, and are priced accordingly. Subaru’s Outback and Forester are perhaps the main options in this category these days, and look like they have the interiors that can take a beating.
But just the mere experience of using a station wagon to haul over a hundred pounds of fencing felt like a retro practice by the early 2000s, and only more so in 2022. After all, when was the last time you saw a Peugeot station wagon loaded up with timber?
All I needed was a Nirvana tape for the 505’s tape deck to fully recreate the early 1990s vibe.
Peugeot left the US over 30 years ago at this point, but a few hundred 505s remain in use.
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Next time you’re at Lowe’s or Home Depot, look around and try to see just how many station wagons are there, and which ones are getting filled up with construction materials.
If you got your driver’s license in the 1990s or the early 2000s, you may have experienced the tail end of this era. But unless you own an older station wagon right now, odds are you won’t be using one any time soon in lieu of a truck to haul over a hundred pounds worth of anything. That’s an experience a younger generation may not have, as everything becomes an SUV, a truck, or some kind of crossover.
Jay Ramey Jay Ramey grew up around very strange European cars, and instead of seeking out something reliable and comfortable for his own personal use he has been drawn to the more adventurous side of the dependability spectrum.
Keyword: Is Using a Station Wagon like a Truck Already Retro?