Yahoo Autos Junkyard Gem: 2000 Hyundai Elantra GLS Wagon
The station wagon's final period of true mainstream sales relevance in North America took place during the 1990s, though the minivan and SUV had long since been shoving the wagon aside by that point. Peak Wagon — measured by the number of new wagon models available here — occurred in either 1964 or 1977, when 47 different wagons were in American dealerships. The Ford Taurus wagon got the axe in 2005, 14 years after the Country Squire went away, with the Saturn L300 and Ford Focus wagons disappearing around the same time. Hyundai saw the writing on the wall a bit earlier, though, and gave up on the longroof here after 2000. Here's one of those final-model-year cars, found in a Denver self-service car graveyard recently.
Around this time, many of you are sputtering angrily, "But what about the 2009-2012 Elantra Touring?" I say that car was a hatchback, albeit a slightly stretched one, designed for Europeans and then hurriedly equipped with Elantra badges for the North American market. A real station wagon should be based on a sedan, and that's exactly what Hyundai did with the 1996-2000 Elantra.
In fact, this wagon is derived so faithfully from the sedan that you can still see the original sedan roofline around the rear doors. Why design new doors if you don't have to?
The Elantra got a new grille in 1999, and it may well have influenced the snout of the then-in-development Pontiac Aztek. It ensured that nobody would mistake the Elantra for a Corolla (the wagon version of which was discontinued here after 1996), which probably seemed important at the time.
This 2.0-liter DOHC straight-four made 133 horsepower, 11 more than the 2000 Ford Focus wagon.
