Greatest estates

Sports cars, hot hatches and saloons are often the first port of call when you start thinking about automotive ‘GOATs’ but what about the estates? Yes, they are practical load luggers, but surely they still deserve recognition?

BMW 3 Series Touring (E30)

The BMW E30 is revered: it’s regarded as the best BMW 3 Series ever built, and for good reason. Following on from the ‘shark nose’ models, observers felt that was the peak of design and it could not be topped, but when the E30 was launched, it moved the dial. It had everything: style, great performance, pinpoint handling and advanced technology and that all pointed to a success story. As a consequence UK buyers couldn’t help themselves. Then came the Touring version, an estate par excellence, and it was arguable as to whether this was better looking than the saloon, but what wasn’t arguable was that it definitely offered a blend of performance and practicality that ticked all the boxes that the saloon couldn’t.

Audi RS4 Avant

The RS4 was everything you want in a performance car. Great looks, fantastic interior, state-of-the-art tech and breakneck acceleration. Buyers of RS4s felt they had tapped into some sort of secret society that only the discerning would know about. The first RS4 was introduced in 1999, produced by Audi Sport GmBH for Audi AG, and then Audi canned it for a while until reinvigorating it in 2012. The idea was to take on the ‘M’ cars of BMW and the AMG models produced by Mercedes-Benz, and then benchmarking got more intense with each trying to outdo the other in terms of performance and handling. Whatever you might think about these cars as performance vehicles, it is fair to say that the RS4 Avant was fast but spacious enough to facilitate trips to the local tip with a fair degree of style and verve.

Volvo 850 Estate (1991)

Volvo has made some great estate cars: the 940, in particular, takes some beating and the, T5-R for its outright performance is up there too, but the 850 has an ace up its sleeve. It’s the only estate to compete in the British Touring Car Championship (BTCC) and in that respect it trumps its Volvo bedfellows. In April 1994, two blue and white-livered Volvo 850 estate cars rolled up to Thruxton’s start line for the BTCC season opener. Eyes rolled and even the drivers, Rickard Rydell and Jan Lammers, were somewhat perplexed, with Rydell remarking: “When I signed up for Volvo... I didn’t know about the estate plans. If I’d known, I would probably have hesitated!” The 850 saloon was ground-breaking. It was the first car with a transverse five-cylinder engine, a unique delta-link rear axle, integrated side-impact protection, and self-adjusting front seat belts. Later it became the first car in the world to offer side airbags. When the estate version joined the saloon two years later, it collected a number of awards for its clever design. The Italians even went as far as to brand it the ‘most beautiful estate’. High praise indeed from a nation that prides itself on design excellence.

Skoda Superb Super Combi (2009)

Car anoraks will know that the first Skoda Superb was introduced in 1934 by the Czech car maker and, contrary to all the jokes about Skoda in the ’70s and ’80s, this was something of a ‘limousine’. It was a luxury vehicle designed to attract the well-to-do. It lasted until 1949 and laid dormant until Skoda reintroduced the name-plate in 2001 with a new car based on the 1999 Shanghai-Volkswagen Passat. The estate, however, was not forthcoming until 2009 when Skoda introduced the Super Combi: a five-door with 633 litres of load capacity in the boot. It was a wonderful combination of reliability, fuel economy and affordability. Not only was it supremely spacious, it also came with some unique features unseen on budget-friendly cars, such as umbrellas in the rear doors. A nice touch, but most attractive was the practicality, the decent selection of petrol and diesel engines and the pricetag.

Mercedes-Benz E-Class Estate (W211)

It would be something of a crime if you did not include the E-Class in a best-ever estates list. There’s good reason. The E-Class estate is the benchmark, and pretty much from the ’90s onwards it was the epitome of style, comfort, engineering, technology and refinement. Get behind the wheel of an E-Class and immediately you’ll be engulfed and overwhelmed by the well-designed seats and myriad technologies designed to make your life much nicer. But which model designation to go for? Well, the 2003 Mercedes-Benz E-Class estate (W211) sold by the bucketload for its practicality, luxury, and comfort, naturally. It wasn’t without its issues: early models had some electrical gremlins, but these were addressed in later revisions, leading to greater reliability. Also, the petrol versions weren’t particularly economical and that let it down a little, but if you went for the 320 CDI you couldn’t go far wrong.

Alfa Romeo 156 GTA Sportwagon (2001-2005)

Arguably, the 156 GTA Sportwagon is the best-looking car in the bunch. The 156 Sportwagon, in itself, is a lovely looking vehicle, but the GTA version moved the whole aesthetics thing up a notch. As a model, be it the saloon or the estate, the standard 156 was nicely proportioned and it had all the Alfa flair that you would expect from… an Alfa. Launched in 1997, it enjoyed success but not because it was particularly fast, it was just pleasing on the eye both with regards to the interior as well as exterior. The design was not overcooked, but nevertheless much more sleek than anything the Germans had to offer. It wasn’t scintillating in terms of performance and handling was benign so you couldn’t get too emotional about it. Then, three years later the GTA was launched in both saloon and estate version and the petrolheads started to sit up and listen. The GTA Sportwagon wasn’t a load-lugger in the truest sense: there were others with bigger boots and more practicality, but it was still an estate that you could carry stuff in, enjoy spritely performance in relative comfort and enjoy the fact that people were giving your car admiring glances.