Audi RS6 Performance meets America's wagon enthusiasts

In the 1910s, the ‘automobile’ was an eager upstart in the world of transport. For any journey of meaningful distance in Britain or the US, the train was the obvious choice. To ferry the bourgeoisie and their luggage from a country house to the railway station, manufacturers fitted basic car chassis with square-sided bodies bolted above them.

The British, sensibly enough, named these dependable vehicles ‘estate cars’. Americans called theirs ‘depot hacks’, a term that eventually evolved into ‘station wagons’. Thus, as has happened so often, two countries divided by a shared language found entirely separate names for precisely the same thing. You say tom-A-to, we say estate. And they’re trousers, not pants.

Throughout most of the century that followed, the estate car got on with its job. Equal parts working tool and family companion, it faithfully transported you, your partner, your children and all their possessions from A to B and back again. Boots expanded and contracted; doors and seats appeared or disappeared. Yet the wagon’s adaptable genius – motoring’s Swiss Army knife – never faded. Not on this side of the Atlantic, at least.

Photography: Webb Bland

The estate car disappears in America

In the US, birthplace of the SUV rush, the wagon has been fighting for survival since the early Nineties. There was a time when every manufacturer, from AMC to Oldsmobile, Plymouth and Pontiac, built one. Today, those marques no longer exist. So how many estate models do Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Ford, Dodge and Lincoln offer between them in 2023? None. Not one. The station wagon has reached the end of the line.

Being a fan of long-roof cars in America makes you a genuine eccentric. Even the old soccer-mom jokes have moved on, now aimed at Volvo XC90s and the revived Chrysler minivan. Wanting the wagons Europeans consider entirely normal simply makes you a weirdo.

I have a soft spot for unusual automotive subcultures, for committed people pushing against a current of apathy. So when I heard that Audi planned to unveil a quicker RS6 Avant derivative in San Francisco, I devised a plan: bring together some of the West Coast’s most devoted wagonistas in a welcoming setting. That setting proved to be a backstreet car park north of Oakland, a place locals widely regard as America’s car-break-in capital. News to me. Whoops.

The scheme had been taking shape ever since the current RS6 appeared in autumn 2019. Audi tore up convention by confirming that its new 592bhp twin-turbo beast would be sold in North America – the first RS6 Avant to cross the Atlantic westwards in two decades. I had proposed delivering the first one to arrive in the US and putting on some form of welcome-home celebration. Then COVID intervened, and the RS6’s ticker-tape parade never happened.

By summer 2023, I am instead rumbling over the Golden Gate Bridge in an inky-black RS6 Performance. Better late than never. Replacing the standard RS6, the Performance naturally brings extra muscle. Larger turbochargers tucked into the 4.0-litre V8 run greater boost, raising output to 621bhp and trimming two tenths from the 0–62mph time, which now stands at a ridiculous 3.4 seconds.

Beautifully dished 22in wheels with slim spokes cut 5kg of unsprung mass apiece, helping ride comfort considerably. Audi has also removed 8kg of sound insulation from the front bulkhead, allowing more V8 thunder into the impeccably finished interior. Make the most of it: the next RS6 will probably be electric.

The ‘Performance’ makes little effort to advertise itself as the newest and best RS6. There are no badges or plaques, the seats remain outrageously lacking in bolstering, and it is only at part throttle, as you press a big toe down on a 101 slip road, that an extra hint of V8 rumble emerges. Wondering why the price has risen by £15k to £110,000? So was I.

The explanation arrived the next day, outside the city on the faster, flowing roads threading through Napa County’s hills. This RS6 has a sinister handling streak. Audi has finally overcome its usual caution with the active rear differential, giving the RS6 a dose of hooligan character. It is not an unhinged, M3 Touring-style lout, but neither is it an understeering barge. At last, there is an RS6 capable of everything.

I set the RS6 to its softest comfort mode for a scenic trip through San Fran, including the writhing oddity of Lombard Street, “America’s crookedest street”. Channelling Frank Bullitt while hauling a two-tonne über-wagon up the climbs made famous by Bullitt? Completed it mate. Alcatraz? Spotted from afar, but there is a party to attend.

Audi RS6 Performance heads to Emeryville

Cross the Oakland Bay Bridge eastwards and you reach Emeryville. It is an unusual place: home to Pixar, the animation studio responsible for Toy Story, The Incredibles and Finding Nemo.

Its headquarters, designed by Steve Jobs and marked by a giant lamp mascot outside, sits on an unremarkable road beside a nondescript motel and an enormous Ikea.

Just around the corner stands a plain single-storey building called Fantasy Junction – a name that suggests a strip club on the Island of Sodor. Thankfully, it is an extraordinarily exotic classic-car dealership. Among the countless 911s and E-Types sit Aston Martin and Lola racing cars, a GT40, a pre-war Bentley, Alfas, Vettes and a unique Maserati Indianapolis Coupe listed at $1.4million. Plus a Volvo.

That Volvo is why I came to Fantasy Junction. Searching online for a friendly venue for wagonistas, I noticed a Volvo V70R advertised among the Italian aristocracy. It belonged to Spencer, one of the dealership employees, and he was happy to let fellow obsessives use the car park.

At this point, I owe a massive debt to Adam Cramer of Avants.com. I found him through Instagram; among his many car-enthusiast events is the annual Pacific Northwest Wagonfest. He consulted his little black book of wagon people and hoped to find four or perhaps five owners prepared to sacrifice a Thursday afternoon to meet a total stranger near a smash-and-grab hotspot. Ten turned up. Enthusiasts? More like fanatics.

They are early. The moody RS6 is soon accompanied by two more cheerful-looking Audi S4s, a pair of chrome-covered late-Fifties two-door Americana, what might be the car from Ghostbusters, and a monster truck. Let me introduce them.

WE REVELLED IN A MUTUAL ADORATION OF THE HUMBLE WAGON

Retired Henry is arranging display materials for his cherished Chevy Bel-Air. A familiar face at car shows, he says: “Almost every weekend I’m driving out to events,” he smiles. “I just follow the younger crowd. They lead the way and say ‘Follow us, don’t get lost’.” I am far too bashfully British to enquire about his age, although a friend later reveals that Henry was born before his Chevy left the factory in ’56.

“This car sat on my driveway from 1988 to 1998,” he explains. Henry enlisted custom car and motorcycle builder Cole Foster “to get it running, but look what I got”. It is immaculately clean, its almost surgically pristine engine bay utterly captivating. He leads me to the split tailgate and unloads a boot full of press cuttings gathered while sharing this veteran car with a fresh generation of enthusiasts.

It is a broad church. Tesla engineer Khoa is truly passionate about Audi Avants, and he and his wife Melissa own five. Unable to agree on which one to bring, they arrive separately: she in a near-standard yellow example, he in his air-suspended, low-riding purple pride and joy. Their children wait remarkably patiently while mum and dad indulge their inner geeks.

“I used to follow this car when I was getting into the scene,” Khoa explains. “It’s a well known car across the US, because it’s a converted widebody.” Stanced cars are not normally my thing, but the Californian evening light – and an owner sufficiently cool to carry it off – wins me over. Khoa’s offhand description of the modifications is equally appealing. “Riding on the BBS LMs, nothing huge, just upgraded to RS6 turbos. This is a cruiser.”

Melissa favours a subtler family car, despite its mustard-coloured paint. Her S4 sits lower with more restraint and wears a sleek roof box. “At first it was for my son, but I kinda took it because I really liked it.” Mother knows best.

The original Audi super-wagon is represented by an RS2 Avant. Kirk, a light-beer enthusiast, calls it his dream car. He wanted one badly enough to buy it unseen, then drive it home through three snow-covered states without stopping. “The thing did awesome – the ultimate quattro experience,” he grins. Given that Kirk is delightfully, slightly mad, this is not a surprise. He drove 14 hours from Seattle to attend, although a friend brought the RS2 because Kirk was occupied piloting the Quattromog.

“I really like stupid projects, and I had a vision before I had kids of having a lifted Audi,” he explains. “When she got knocked up we needed something that’d hold car seats, so I looked for a car with a salvage title and a blown engine.” Add a replacement engine and bespoke long-travel suspension, and the result is the world’s gnarliest A4: bull bars, a winch, a roof-mounted zombie axe and battle scars included. It is magnificently bizarre. Only in a country without annual MOT tests could this serve as a daily family car.

There is also a former grandmother-owned Chevy Malibu with an engine conversion producing 700bhp. Andrew mentions its McLaren-rivalling output so casually that he looks puzzled when I nearly collapse with shock. “This little old lady had owned it and kept a logbook of everywhere she ever went and got gas and what she’d paid for it. But it needed some performance, so I left the original patina’d paint but mounted it on a new Speedtech chassis, LT4 V8 and a 10spd automatic. The car just rips.”

He demonstrates the point when he departs, roaring away from the lights in somebody’s grandmother’s wagon. It is the art of the Q car performed flawlessly. Despite all the RS6’s menace and aggression, it is a pity it can never disappear into the background like a Malibu capable of humiliating supercars.

If you prefer extroverts, Adam is your man: Hawaiian shirt, firm handshake and a 5.8m Buick carrying a surfboard that “fits in my garage – barely”. His pride and joy is a 1960 LeSabre beach cruiser. It is emphatically not the Ghostbusters Ecto-1, despite being regularly mistaken for it – that was a Cadillac. When there’s some big wave in your neighbourhood, who ya gonna call?

“A gentleman in New Jersey traded me my ’36 Dodge for it, and when it arrived I decided to make a beach cruiser.” It is a colossal machine, redolent of an age when American car design led the world in unconstrained, blue-sky thinking, while the country rode a wave of post-war economic, political and technological confidence.

Challenging it closely for my personal best in show is Jay Ward’s pea-green Pontiac Safari. Jay is Pixar’s creative franchise boss, just over the road. Why, I ask, was this tremendously characterful two-door not a major character in Cars? “I was working on Ratatouille when I bought this car, but there are some cool hot rods in [Cars] too, lots of nice Fifties car references.” Jay acquired the Safari as a rusted wreck while his family was expanding, then spent three years restoring it with care, bidding on scarce parts through eBay and pursuing leads from what he calls the wagon ‘network’. “They only made 1,292 of these, which is a minuscule number for General Motors in the Fifties.”

The RS6 has captivated the men representing the contemporary super-estate end of the spectrum. Steven and his son arrive in an equally blacked-out Cadillac CTS-V Sport Wagon, arguably the final and quickest American estate car. It is essentially a retuned Corvette ZR1 V8 housed in a sharply styled, wardrobe-swallowing body. Steven had visited the dealer intending to buy the saloon, “but the best salesman in the world showed me this, and I couldn’t believe such a beautiful car could exist. The salesman was devastated, saying he’d miss looking at the car every day.”

Sebastian would also consider a swap. His wonderfully understated, factory-specification E55 AMG is a true sleeper. “I take it fly fishing in the Sierras, and I sleep in the back,” he explains. “It’s got 600lb ft and I just adore this car. Every time I get in and go, it puts a smile on my face.” It could scarcely be further removed from today’s technology-laden, aggressively styled AMGs, with hybrid this and haptic that. By current standards, its wheels look hilariously small. There is a supercharged V8 party at the front and plenty of space business at the rear. Superb.

As the sun dropped beneath the bay and the sound of evening commuters faded, we gathered with questionable fizzy drinks and celebrated our shared love for the unassuming wagon in all its forms. Then, one at a time, we shook hands and left to spread the gospel far and wide. Outnumbered by SUVs? Certainly, but that is a cult rather than a culture. Need some junk in your trunk? I like big boots and I cannot lie.

Meet the Estates

Car: Chevy Bel-Air
Owner: Henry
Tell us why you love your wagon: It's subtle, and it's timeless

Car: Chevy Malibu
Owner: Andrew
Tell us why you love your wagon: I just always liked that long, sleek look

Car: Audi RS2 Avant
Owner: Kirk
Tell us why you love your wagon: It's my dream car, the ultimate quattro experience

Car: Buick Le Sabre
Owner: Adam
Tell us why you love your wagon: A wagon is just the beach cruiser to have here on the West Coast

Car: Pontiac Safari
Owner: Jay
Tell us why you love your wagon: It's kinda like having a little insider's club, there's a network of people who love wagons

Car: Audi S4 Avant
Owner: Melissa
Tell us why you love your wagon: There's enough space for the family, the dogs, we can fit the kids in the back

Car: Audi S4 Avant
Owner: Khoa
Tell us why you love your wagon: Here in the US there's not a lot of wagons, and we wanted to be a little bit different

Car: Mercedes E55 AMG
Owner: Sebastian
Tell us why you love your wagon: I love estate cars because they're the perfect combination of performance, comfort and practicality

Car: Cadillac CTS-V
Owner: Steven
Tell us why you love your wagon: There's nothing else out there like them!

Car: 'Quattromog'
Owner: Kirk (again)
Tell us why you love your wagon: It's kinda like a truck, but one that your mom drives