The term "shooting brake" has been cropping up a lot in automotive media in the last week.
You probably only know what the term means if you're really up on car history, or you were frequenting English country estates prior to World War II.
Shooting brakes were originally intended to carry country squires and their equipment on hunting excursions. Rolls-Royce was making a wooded shooting-brake version of the Silver Ghost as early as 1910.
More recently, the term has been appropriated to make cars that combine sports-car performance with increased carrying capacity palatable to drivers who don't want to be behind the wheel of a station wagon.
Shooting brakes don't, strictly speaking, have to gel completely with the popular image of the station wagon. The two-door Ferrari FF and Volvo C30 have both been referred to as shooting brakes. Shooting brakes invariably, however, contain a degree of carrying capacity and backseat headspace that makes them differ from the average coupe or hatchback. And they combine this with a driving experience that is greatly enhanced over that of the average people-carrier.
In the last couple of weeks, Mercedes has revealed its CLS and CLS 63 AMG shooting brakes to much admiring buzz.
The company calls the CLS an "aesthetic coupé with innovative spatial concept" and describes it as "exceptional, confident, masculine and attractive" (italics ours). "It is thus an inimitable reflection of the excitingly distinguished lifestyle of those highly discerning customers that have already admitted to their fascination by the four-door CLS Coupé and its internationally acclaimed design," Mercedes says.
The AMG, with its 5.5 litre V8 biturbo AMG engine, has industry observers particularly breathless. Automobile magazine refers to it as the "big bad Benz wagon" and expounds on its impressive torque and horsepower (590 lb-ft, 557 hp): "Compared to the all-wheel-drive Audi S7 - the CLS63 AMG Shooting Brake's closest rival - the Merc's V-8 is up 105 hp and 110 lb-ft in its base tune over the Audi's 4.0-liter twin-turbo unit."
Perhaps because of the excitement caused by the Mercedes models, speculation has sprouted as to what other car companies might have shooting brake offerings on the horizon. Two likely contenders, according to industry blogs and magazines, are Porsche and, incredibly, McLaren.
Torque News and Autoblog both cite the German magazine Auto Bild as indicating that Porsche could debut a shooting brake version of the Panamera at the Paris Motor Show in October.
Says Torque News, "[W]e would expect that the new Shooting Brake model would offer many of the same features and powertrain tidbits as the traditional Panamera sedan. This means that the Panamera Shooting Brake could come in a variety of trimlines including a base model, an "S" model, an all wheel [sic] drive '4' model with a performance 'S' package and a Turbo model that also offers a high performance 'S' package. Should this be the case, the Panamera Shooting Brake would offer power output range from 300 to 550 horsepower while torque output would range from 295 in the base V6 to 553lb-ft (or 590 in the Turbo S models during overboost)."
Press reports say that a McLaren shooting brake would be intended to rival Ferrari FF and would be based on the MP4-12C. As both eGMCarTech and Autocar point out, the MP4-12C is a mid-engined, two-seater, and some very heavy design alterations would have to be made.
The 3.8-litre twin-turbo V8 engine will have to be re-located to make way for groceries - or, er, guns.
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