Words by Marcus Boothby
Picture this for a moment; you own a Porsche 911 but your wife has told you to sell it as you’re expecting a baby, you’re moving house, and you’re told you have to sell the 911. You’re devastated but you know your family comes first and moving house in a 911 isn’t considered practical. So what do you do? Well, we have your answer.
Sure, getting rid of the sports car you’ve wanted for years isn’t fun but, there are family friendly cars out there that are as fun as a 911 yet can handle a baby and a house move. Enter the performance estate.
Granted, you can get a powerful SUV but you don’t want to look like that guy who effectively took a massive downgrade to a diesel 2 tonne SUV. As a fellow enthusiast, you know you can’t have fun in a SUV, but you can in a powerful estate. The idea of a performance estate has been around for decades now, with the earliest example we can think of being the Audi S2 from the 90s. The Audi S2 was the first of Audi’s now staple fast estate, with it spawning various S and RS models as successors. Other manufacturers have caught on with the likes of Mercedes, Cadillac and even Opel/Vauxhall when they went a bit chav-tastic Vectra and Insignia VXR estates. BMW tried with the E60 M5 but realised that everyone was buying RS6’s and E63’s, and quickly gave up.
Starting at the cheaper end of the market, you can still pick up low mileage VW Golf R estates for between £25,000-30,000, and for the money, you get 300bhp, AWD, sleeper looks and a dependable interior full of the latest tech. Prices will further go down when VW reveal the Mk8 Golf R hatchback and hopefully, estate. Alternatively, at this price, you have the SEAT Leon Cupra and Skoda Octavia RS iV estates, which are both brand new models for 2020. However, a strong contender surprisingly comes from Peugeot in the form of the 508 PHEV. The 508 PHEV isn’t inherently a performance estate, but it does produce 300bhp thanks to a 1.6 turbocharged petrol engine, and a hybrid system. It also looks great and has a wonderful interior.
Want to spend a bit more? Well, for £40,000-60,000, your choice starts to look a lot more tempting. The German triumvirate are here with the Audi S4 (now a diesel), BMW M340i and Mercedes C43 AMG. All three are fantastic cars in their own right, all with their own individual quirks and features trying to win you over. The Audi has the best range out of the three, the Merc has the most kerb appeal and the BMW is probably the best all rounder. However, Volvo does offer the V60 T8 Polestar Engineered, which is a 400bhp AWD hybrid behemoth. This is a strong competitor to the German triumvirate, but a bit more left-field.
Now, we’re at the top tier of performance estates, and there are only really two options. The Audi RS6 and Mercedes E63 S AMG. Both the Audi and Merc are brand new, with UK deliveries of the RS6 starting in the past month, and the E63 S AMG facelift was revealed earlier this week. Both are the pinnacle of the fast estate market, and it’s very hard to choose between the two. Both are 600bhp+ estates, both offer AWD as standard and both cost over £100,000 with options. The RS6 and E63 S AMG are more than capable of hauling your family around at illegal speeds (we don’t condone speeding by the way, it’s stupid), while being ridiculously comfortable at the same time. They are capable enough to replace a sports car and a SUV. We love them.
But the performance estates don’t stop there. There’s a VW Arteon Shooting Brake coming out sometime this year, which should have an R version, which should have similar performance numbers to the Golf R estate. Porsche also have a SportTurismo version of the Taycan in the works and for our international readers, Genesis are launching a shooting brake version of the G70 which should be ready by 2021.
So there you have it, performance estates. Some performance estates are valid supercar killers, with silly amounts of power going to all four wheels allowing for fun times no matter where you are. But the true beauty of fast estates is that they’re also normal cars, as at the end of the day, they’re still estates meaning you can still fit your IKEA shopping in the back.