Opinion: why are we still waiting for electric estate cars?

Much like Christmas presents for anyone over three years old, it really does seem that if you’re going to buy a new car, it had better be electrically powered.

And, generally speaking, that’s not a huge dilemma – in fact, it’s wonderful for any number of reasons. You don’t need to worry about huge servicing costs, for instance. You can drive them through city centres anywhere in the world without paying an arm, two legs and a decent amount of torso just to do so. And you can indulge in serious smugness the next time there’s, say, a nationwide panic over petrol shortages.

Also, we’d be remiss not to mention the whole environmental thing, even if – sure as night follows day and bots follow Twitter accounts – it’ll give someone apoplexy about how they’re not akchually good for the environment, et cetera, ad nauseum.  

However, there is bad news, even for those of us who don’t view electric-powered transport as a personal insult. Yes, there’s a very real, very large problem with electric cars: where are all the wagons?

An exhaustive (or at the very least, exhausting) search returns only two fully-electric, proper estates currently on sale. At one end, it’s the immensely appealing but intensely expensive Porsche Taycan Cross/Sport Turismo; at the other, it’s an MG that’s decently priced but also as appealing as being robbed at gunpoint.

So, filled with the amount of despair one would expect when your situation could be warbled out by Morrissey, we come to the obvious question: why?

Unfortunately, much like the question of your least-favourite subject in high school, the answer is almost definitely economics. The fact of the matter is that SUVs, crossovers and so on remain extraordinarily popular. As much as car people hate them, as easy a target as they are for a seemingly everlasting font of bile, they still sell like half-price hotcakes.

SUVs and crossovers are kind of like modern pop music in that regard – people who are fanatical about music would rather eat Ed Sheeran than listen to his music, but a staggering number of people buy his albums and stream his songs. And so it goes with estates – if you truly care about cars and about driving, it’ll be blindingly obvious why wagons are a better choice and broadly migraine-inducing why no one else seems to be making it.

The direct result of this rather miserable state of affairs is that car companies, being in the business of making... well, cars, of course – but also money, if they can help it – will naturally seek to supply the biggest markets first. Short of one company having an iPhone moment and setting the new path for everyone else to follow, you can expect EV estates from your favourite manufacturer at about the same pace as Blade Runner films, while electro-SUVs get churned out like Marvel movies.

So, what’s the answer? Well, if you’re an eternal optimist, it’s fomenting a wholesale change in car-buying behaviour, extolling the virtues of the overlooked station wagon and convincing vast throngs of buyers that, now the EV future is no longer metaphorically in the air, it has absolutely no need to be there literally, either.

In a nutshell, we’re talking about electric estate evangelism. And that sounds lovely. But in reality? Sit tight, and hope this year’s Christmas gift will be battery-powered, like you wanted last time.