THE FAST AND THE FURIOUSLY PRACTICAL

I’ve been waiting my whole career to write this story. See, I love station wagons, and the more powerful, the better. I’ve spent much of my career championing them as the perfect vehicle—some say too much, though I say not nearly enough. Such is my rep, a man from AMG told me he figures I was personally responsible for half of all E 63 wagon sales. (It’s not a large number.)

I hit the wagon jackpot when I first worked for MotorTrend, as I was assigned chaperone duty for our long-term Cadillac CTS-V wagon. Let’s say I enjoyed my time with that 556-horsepower manual station wagon. I was able to compare it to a brown Mercedes E 63 AMG wagon—as it was then called—but then Caddy killed off its best product of the past few decades, and I was sad.

The AMG remained the sole superwagon on sale in the U.S. until Porsche delivered the Sport Turismo version of the Panamera Turbo a few years back. Then Audi did the seemingly unthinkable and brought the ultimate verbotene Frucht stateside this year, the long lusted-over RS 6 Avant. That’s right, friends, we suddenly have three 600-hp (or near enough) wagons in a comparison. Turned out 2020 had one small silver lining.

There’s an in-joke with, and perhaps about, auto journalists: We all want brown, manual, diesel station wagons. Part of that is true, and I’ll go so far as to take some credit