In the late 1980s, Chrysler transformed its Town & Country, and most other station wagons it produced, by reimagining it as one of Chrysler’s first-generation minivans, built on the front-drive S platform and sharing its powertrain with Lee Iacocca’s ubiquitous K-cars. That’s notable because for most of the time leading up to then, the Town & Country was a massive, luxury-packed conventional station wagon with a longitudinal layout and an overall length that stretched right out of sight.
The Chrysler minivans rocked the automotive world as few new cars before them, defining a new way to carry people and their possessions.
Thing was, the redefinition of the wagon erased some of the attributes that made Americans love big station wagons in the first place: Gobs of big-block power, enough to ferry a full family across the continent, with their belongings in back and whatever was left over in a trailer bobbing along behind. It’s a portrait in time that defines the postwar American dream as
