Walk around Volvo's LA Auto Show display for a few minutes, like I did, and there's one noticeable omission. Pasadena moms and Santa Monica and Santa Barbara surfer dads who run around in turbo V70s and are coming to the show will be disappointed: There are precisely zero wagons on the stand.
What the hell?
Oh sure, there's the unbelievably awesome S60 Polestar, and it's so awesomely blue that it's a reason you should all go.
But the XC70 — which is in production, on sale in this country and the most wagon-like car Volvo still makes — is nowhere to be found. While Volvo found time to bring two XC60s, and representatives of the slow-selling S80 and aged XC90 lines, they didn't bring the most Volvo-ish model of theirs from their New Jersey HQ. This must be the first time the LA Auto Show hasn't had a Volvo wagon in it since, um... well, a really, really long time.
The last major Swedish car company is slowly committing suicide in the US market and this has to be the latest sign. Volvo's anti-wagon stance in the US is the antithesis of what the company stands for and now it looks like they're going to ignore the last model standing.
The man at the stand who I put on the spot about the XC70 snub didn't know why it was left out, if one was coming to LA later or anything, but he just said there wasn't enough space. He kind of looked at me like he wanted to say, "No, but we have a brown XC60!"
I say, there's always space for a Volvo wagon. Always.