Most station wagons are conventional designs with a front-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout and four doors and a rear hatch. In Europe, that formula is sometimes different. Some companies, such as Volkswagen and Fiat, built a number of cars with rear-engine layouts. European cars were also generally smaller than American cars, so two-door wagons (and some sportier wagons with lower rooflines, often called shooting brakes) were fairly common. Some two-door wagons included the Opel Kadett and Volvo 1800ES. Domestic two-door wagons used to be common in the US, often as lower-priced alternatives to their larger four-door stablemates. Compact wagons such as the Studebaker Lark were common in two-door form. But after about 1965, domestic two-door wagons had all but disappeared, leaving the niche to European imports. And of those imports, none was quite as ubiquitous and popular as the Volkswagen Type 3 Squareback.
