Tell you what, there's a certain kind of vehicle that makes a country boy's heart hurt a little, and that's a good wagon we can't buy in America. Autoblog's European editors spent time with the VW ID.7 Tourer, the long-roof version of VW's big electric sedan, and their takeaway is one I've been hollering about for years: the rest of the world gets wagons and we get yet another crossover.

The ID.7 Tourer is exactly what it sounds like. Same electric platform as the ID.7 sedan, but stretched out back into a proper estate body with a big hatch and a cargo floor you could actually load a cooler, a dog crate and two weeks of camping gear onto without playing Tetris. VW quotes cargo figures north of 600 liters with the seats up, which is more than plenty for a float trip's worth of tackle and a smoker in the back. Range on the bigger battery pack lands somewhere around 300 miles on the European cycle, so it's a real driver, not a grocery-cart EV.

What caught my eye in the review was how the wagon shape fixes the sedan's one weak spot. The standard ID.7 has a trunk; the Tourer has a mouth. Drop the tailgate and you're loading flat, and the roofline is long enough that a rooftop cargo box or a kayak rack doesn't kill the looks or the aerodynamics the way it does on a stubby crossover. There's a smart panoramic roof that switches from clear to frosted at the touch of a button too, which is the kind of gadget I'd roll my eyes at and then quietly use every single day.

So why don't we get it? The usual sad arithmetic. VW doesn't figure Americans will buy a wagon, electric or otherwise, so they send us the ID.4 and call it good. And I reckon the sales numbers back them up, since we quit buying wagons in bunches twenty years ago and started buying trucks and crossovers instead. But I'd argue we never stopped wanting them. We just stopped being offered anything worth wanting. Every time a manufacturer actually brings a wagon over here, the Subaru Outback and the Audi Allroad folks snap them up and the rest of us stand around wishing.

An electric wagon with 300 miles of range and a real cargo hold would fit a whole lot of American lives better than another tall hatchback pretending to be an SUV. Lower center of gravity means it'll handle a winding Ozark road better than any crossover, and the wagon body means you're not lifting your gear up over your head to get it in the back. My knees already know which one they'd pick.

The review came away positive: it's comfortable and quiet, practical, quick enough to get out of its own way. Does it hold up when it matters? On paper, yes. Twenty miles from the nearest paved road is really the only place I'd want to see it prove itself, and I'll allow that an EV wagon isn't headed down a two-track to a deer lease anytime soon. But for the 95 percent of driving most folks actually do, hauling kids and groceries and the occasional load of mulch, this thing is close to the perfect shape.

So we sit here reading about it while Europe gets the long roof and we get another trim level of something with black plastic cladding on the wheel arches. If VW ever wises up and ships the Tourer stateside, I'll be first in line to put some gravel-road miles on one. Until then, I'll keep admiring it from across the pond, the same way I admire a lot of things I can't have. Doesn't mean I have to like it.