Future historians will probably not account this the golden age of the estate car - nor a golden age for strong and silent types in general. A brief association in the late 1960s with rugged and remote ski-tanned Europeans was possibly the estate's last brush with exoticism. Since when, like no other kind of car, it has settled in the main for a life of quiet desperation, a sensible choice in an unexciting but practical shape, suitable for the portage of children and ready-bagged composting materials.
The action is elsewhere and the estate's natural constituency is these days lured in more colourful directions. People who want a car they can stuff with ropes and crampons and drive up Scottish mountains can pick from the burgeoning sports utility 4x4 catalogue.
And people with families to manage, who once held the Volvo estate to be the incarnated ideal of the automotive au pair - Maria from the Sound of Music, only without the singing, and bulletproof - can now choose from an almost limitless selection of people carriers, great and small, whose cunning adaptability and multi-variousness make the estate's basic premise (a normal car but with a big boot) look a little low on imagination.
It's still the vehicle of choice for dogs, though. Ten out of 10 dogs hope their owners will prefer one. Ease of access, leg-room, ride comfort, visibility, optional grille bars: there isn't a dog in the land who isn't ticking these boxes in relation to the estate experience.
Most sports utility vehicles are so high off the ground that your dog has to be virtually airborne or a St Bernard to be able to climb in. And a people carrier is the least dog-friendly environment on the road. It will contain a moulded plastic storage unit for everything - your bottles, your road maps, your pen, your sunglasses - but nothing to fit a dog.
One could let it roam loose in the back, but it would most likely tread all over the tray tables and get its nose stuck in the cupholders. Certainly the thinned-out boot space is a no-no mutt-wise. You could, I suppose, cram a spaniel into the space behind the third row of seats in a Renault Espace, but you would need to squeeze it quite hard and shut the door very quickly.
For some reason, the motoring industry hasn't generally tended to forefront dog-friendliness in its attempts to keep the estate car alive in our thoughts. Instead, the recent trend has been to make estate cars that are ever more powerful and sporty, to the extent that we might forget they are estate cars at all.
Skoda recently launched the Octavia vRS, which is a police motorway patrol car in all but the paintwork. And now here we have the Audi S4 Avant, which has a 4.2 litre V8 engine, a six-speed gearbox and will sprint to the speed limit faster than any sack of compost really needs to go. Or any spaniel, for that matter.
I drove the Avant in the same week that I tested a yob-heaven, banana yellow Mitsubishi Evo VIII - one of those cars that is so desperately aggressive that it has an airhole in the bonnet. I know which car felt more dangerously pacey and more likely to end up on its roof in a forest, and it wasn't the Evo.
There is something undeniably counter-intuitive about sitting behind the wheel of an estate car and having your neck velcro'd to the headrest by the g-forces. And because it's an Audi and the engine has been hand-built down the years by generations of Bavarian craftsmen, or thereabouts, the car performs its astonishing feats of acceleration with perfect ease and an almost sinister level of quiet. You depress the accelerator and hear nothing but the engine's uncomplaining murmur of assent, and the soft thud of your pet's head hitting the back window.
It's a superb sensation, though one mildly worries that the S4 Avant may further resemble a sports car in the sense that only the driver really gets to have fun in it, while the passengers cling on, gamely smiling in as much as the suspension allows them to. Whisper it, but this may, unhelpfully, be a one-man estate.
And not even one man and his dog. I don't in fact own a dog - nor indeed an Audi S4 Avant. But even if I did own both, I'm not sure I would let the one go in the other. The car has that ultra-valeted Audi sheen to it, like a company director's office. A dog would only scuff up the carpet, slobber on the upholstery and embarrass the visitors. Some may feel the same goes for children.
I don't know what the solution is to this, unless Audi develops a version with a fully rubberised and hoseable interior. It's not beyond the bounds of possibility. And they could call it: "Man's best friend's best friend."
