Performance difference is minimal for stock cars and the wagon has much more utility. Plus, there are fewer WRX wagons on the road than sedans.

 

I have a 02 2.5 RS and a 03 wagon. I love the extra room of the wagon.

The wagon has that big cavity behind you to help resonate the exhaust sounds and road noise. With the stock muffler you can barely hear the car running. At speed on the highway, it doesn't really interfere with your stereo entertainment. If you add a loud muffler...that might be a different story.

 

i've never heard anybody with a wagon say "man, i should've gotten the sedan", but i've heard the equivalent from sedan owners.

me, i'm a wagon man.

 

Unless capacity is really important to you it's hard to argue against the wider stance of the sedan when it comes to handling. The sedan is also faster but not by all that much. The wagon is heavier but thetas obvious with all that extra glass.So other than the sedan being a better handling car there is not much difference. your best bet is to think about how important the extra capacity of the wagon is and look at the kind of driving you do. If your going to be on the freeway most of the time it doesn't matter that much but if you take the long way home, on twisty little back roads, just to enjoy the turns (like I do) it's the sedan all the way.

P.S. I wouldn't pay any attention to the poll, only the posts. Family Fude style is all about being mediocre, any one who wants that has issues from childhood.

That said there are more sedans than wagons.

 

I agree what everyone's said about the advantages of wagons here. (more usable space, stealth ability, etc) but one thing that I definitely *don't* like about the wagon is the way it feels when you push it. I borrowed a buddy's sedan back over a year ago for a weekend. He told me to drive it like I stole it, so I did, and I absolutely loved the way it felt neutral sliding around corners hard. It felt even more neutral than in my C5 which was later traded in on the Wagon. The C5 tended to understeer in faster turns and oversteer in slower, tighter turns.

So when I went to start haggling with Subbie dealerships, I asked to test drive a wagon, and I took a salesperson out on a road that I had been introduced to by an Acura salesman down the road from the Subbie dealer. The road had great tight turns, off-camber altitude changes and stuff, and I'd done it in the Vette before, so I at least knew where the really hairy turns were.

So after the first few corners the Subbie salesman knew that I knew how to drive (club licensed road-racer) and was progressively going faster when all of the sudden I got into my first drift, and I almost drove the car straight off the road.

The wagon doesn't handle neutral AT ALL. It understeers like a pig. Nothing at all like the sedan. At the time I didnt' think about it much, but once I took delivery of my car, I had more of a chance to explore it, and my wagon handles completely differently than the sedan when you drive it hard. I knew it had a more narrow track, but what I *didn't* know before I got my wagon was that the rear anti-roll bar in the wagon is significantly thinner than the sedan, which is why it feels like it rolls more and understeers badly. You can get it into a steady-state drift but it's not easy - you have to do the Scandinavian Flick or really let off the throttle at the edge to unsettle the suspension while pushing hard in the wagon while in the sedan it just seemed to transition right into a neutral drift with no effort at all.

And the bad part is that you can't just take someone's takeoff sedan rear anti-roll bar because of the track difference. So you're stuck with an understeering car (which sucks if you race) and you can't fix it without getting booted out of the stock classes in road racing. Had I known that the anti-roll bar was different in the wagon, I *might* have gone for the sedan. The main reason I went for the Wagon in the first place was that I mountain bike alot and I couldn't figure out for the life of me how I could get my bike into the sedan, and at the time I was under the impression that it was hard to get a good roof-rack for the sedan. Now I've seen a few different roof rack options, and whenever I drive hard, I'm wishing I had the sedan...

So I guess the point is that if you like to drive hard or road race, you're probably not going to like the feel of the wagon, so make sure you drive both (hard) before you decide.

-B

PS: The C5 swallowed two MTBs as easy as my wagon does. :-)

 

you absolutely CAN. The rear sway bars are EXACTLY the same width. I helped do one last weekend, and this is actually a VERY popular mod for wagons. ( I personally have met about 8 wagon owners, ALL OF THEM had sedan bars on.
The swap takes all of 20 min if you know what you are doing.
It makes the wagon MUCH more neutral.

 

Uh, maybe I'm missing something but the two areas where the wagon doesn't perform as well as the sedan is accelleration and braking and that's because of the extra 80#. In terms of slalom speed, I seem to recall that the wagon was faster than the sedan (check Motor Trend since they are the only magazine which tested both the sedan and wagon on the slalom). Might be because of the narrower stance and/or better weight distribution.

In terms of performance on the track, all things being equal (tires and suspension set-up), the difference comes down to driver and not car potential. The extra 1" of rear track and .8" of front track doesn't seem to make a lot of difference, if any, unless you are preparing a serious track car. And there, it would be interesting to see how equally prepared cars would compare. The major advantage that I can see of the sedan is the ability to use wider tires.