Yahoo Autos Junkyard Gem: 2005 Mazda6 Wagon with Manual Transmission
Station wagons were once so mainstream in American culture that even Ford's Mercury Division sold three completely different wagons with faux-wood flanks as late as 1982 (Toyota also sold three wagon models here that year). Minivans and SUVs have killed off all but a handful of wagon models by now, and modern automatics have nearly eliminated the manual transmission from car showrooms… but those trends didn't stop Mazda from offering the Mazda6 station wagon with the incredibly-rare-for-the-21st-century V6/manual powertrain combination. I managed to spot one of these hen's-teeth machines at a snow-covered yard in northeastern Colorado a few weeks back.
The Mazda6 replaced the 626 here for the 2003 model year, and Americans could buy a Mazda6 wagon from 2004 through 2007. Since the Mazda5 minivan showed up here for 2006, followed by the CX-7 and CX-9 SUVs the next year, the calculation to dump the station wagon made sense.
Still, a tiny but vocal minority of American drivers prefer wagons to taller and less car-like machinery. Though I'm a Generation X-er with a 1970s childhood, my family had a Chevrolet G-Series passenger van instead of the usual Kingswood Estate or Country Squire, so I don't shed many tears over the departure of the wagon from daily-driver relevance on our roads (that said, my daily beater driver these days is a 2004 Subaru Outback wagon… with 5-speed manual).
Believe it or not, the five-on-the-floor manual was the base transmission in all but the very costliest trim levels of the 2005 Mazda6. I prefer the five-on-the-tree column-shift manual, but that setup never really caught on in North America.
