Name that Car #4: Unnamed wagon in Target Facebook ad

Posted by Target on Facebook August 20, 2013

What we have here is a classic scene from American late 20th century culture: a station wagon filled with stuff that a college student will need to live on his or her own for the next four glorious years.

As you can see, I "like" Target. The main reason I shop at Target is because the service, quality and (surprisingly) prices of my local Walmart are very poor indeed. Yet one of the reasons I "like" Target is that they don't have ridiculous "edgy" advertising. This is just lighthearted, feel-good stuff. This particular picture kinda reminds me of 1980's commercials with their warm tones and happy jingles.

Wait! Look at the wagon! No wonder it reminds me of the 80's... that wagon looks like it's from about 1980. I perfectly understand the need of non-automotive companies to use completely nondescript, unidentifiable vehicles in their advertising, since they don't want to alienate buyers of other car brands or peg their company to the image of the brand you see on the screen. Generally this effect is silly, since they resort to debadging a 1980s BMW or similar, and just assume we'll write it off as a boxy old car with no known provenance. This does much of the same thing. Target doesn't sell cars and they don't really want you to know or care what wagon this is. But too bad for them, because I do care, and I will figure it out.

They did a good job making it look nondescript. The tailgate is up and out of the way, preventing us from seeing the badge itself. The design language of the rear end is neither very distinctive nor very recent...  this looks like a car I have probably not seen on the roads in a long time.

1985 Mercedes W123 looks great, but it's not the one.

My first impression when I saw it was Mercedes-Benz. Compare it to a W123 or W201 wagon, though, and you see that the Mercs always had a certain texture to the glass that this wagon doesn't share. It's obviously not a Merc, or an Audi, which had decidedly square taillights.

The triangular amber indicators that you see at the top of the taillight cluster flummoxed me for a bit. Almost all of the period wagons that would be known to North Americans had proud upright rectangles for taillights. All of my earliest guesses for American makes were badly wrong: Ford Fairmont (no resemblence), Ford LTD (none here either), or even ugly Japanese wagons like the Nissan Prairie. All were highly angular and had none of that comparatively interesting shape of the rear that we see on this example.

So I did a few more Google image searches of early-80s wagons that I could remember. I stuck with the German idea and it hit me that it might be a Volkswagen, simply because they were the most likely to have this kind of obscure, never-used-again design language for a station wagon rear end.

VW sold lots of popular world cars in the United States, but generally only after giving them silly NA-specific names. None of them did very well except the Beetle. The Volkswagen Golf was sold here as the Rabbit, the Volkswagen Type 181 was sold as the Thing, and the first-gen VW Passat made it to the States as the Volkswagen Dasher. I am not sure if the names made them especially memorable, because they have almost totally faded from the American consciousness.  Though the Mk 1 Golf was beloved in Europe, even assembling the car in the US did not help its appeal very much in the States, and the Golf never recaptured the appeal of the old Beetle on our shores.

The Dasher was even more of an odd fellow. As American cars of the 1970s go, it was quite small, but it was the biggest Volkswagen you could buy, and it was not especially cheap. Original MSRP (according to NADA) on a 1978 Volkswagen Dasher wagon was a hefty $6,375. Bearing in mind that 1970s dollars were worth quite a lot of modern dollars, you could have saved almost two grand buying a Chevy Nova of comparable size (although gas mileage and refinement would be much worse) and saved a bit by buying yourself a fancy Buick or a titillating Pontiac Firebird Formula with the top 180-hp V8. I actually still do see Firebirds and Novas of the 1970s on the road today, while I have certainly not seen a Dasher in at least the 15 years since I've been paying attention to all the cars I see. Is the German quality really worth that huge premium, if they don't seem to last any longer overall?

1980 Volkswagen Dasher Diesel

But this is indeed a Volkswagen Dasher, which was sold in the US from 1974 to 1981. I can't possibly determine what year this car is based on the rear end alone. Maybe I had a fortunate guess in the first place, since the taillights of the wagon share no styling resemblance with those of the sedan.

I'll credit the excellent Consumer Guide car book of the 1970s (the entire collection spans the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s as well) for jogging my memory. The whole collection is amazing, but the 1940s book is hard to find, and the 1930s book is downright rare (and correspondingly expensive). Buy all those books if you can find them, as they rank among the best resources for car aficionados in the US.