Originally Posted by
JDNSW
The station wagon story given is very much the American station wagon story.
In this country, station wagons were virtually non-existent until the 1950s, and by the 1960s they became commonplace as family cars. The attraction of them for the buyers was pretty much as laid out in the video. For manufacturers, that a large proportion of the parts were the same as the sedan, and they could be built on the same assembly line, and hence could be sold for only a small premium above the sedan, so buyers could afford them.
Almost none of the wagons shown in the video were ever sold in Australia, and station wagons remained very rare until the release of the first Holden wagon in 1957, and Ford produced a wagon only months after the first Falcon sedan in 1960. Into the 1960s wagons became so popular that it seemed like most of the makers were selling them along with sedans by the middle of the sixties.
I don't think I had ever seen a station wagon until the first Holden one, and by then I could be described as a car mad teenager, very well informed about cars (but to put it in perspective - no TV until about the same date as the first Holden wagon, and I rarely got to the movies).