The Estates/Station Wagon body style never appealed to us Indians even though we rave quite a bit about practicality and space. Here is the history of wagons in the Indian market. If we look at the foreign automotive markets, especially European and American markets, we can see that there has been a trend of station wagons or estates, as they may be called, capturing a large portion of the market.
Almost all the manufacturers in these markets have a station wagon model on offer, and those models do reasonably well in these markets. But the case with our country is totally different and it is clearly evident from the way our automotive market is growing. The main question that we are to ask ourselves with regards to this is that “Why did estates/station wagons fail in India?”.
Looking at the automotive history of our country, we cannot say that station wagons were not introduced to our market, because the reality is that they were offered to us by various manufacturers across various timelines, till about 2009 when the Tata Indigo Marina was discontinued. Around the 1960s and 1970s we had the Hindustan Motors’ version of a station wagon, which was basically the Ambassador converted to a station wagon. We even had the FIAT version of a station wagon, based on what later came to be known as the FIAT Premier Padmini in our country.
Then Tata Motors played its cards by coming up with the Tata Estate that was based on the Sierra SUV. Later, somewhere around the year 2000, we .