To many of you, born too late to engender nostalgia for such things, a Woody isn’t just a Toy Story character or what you get watching Olivia Munn, but a specific kind of car. Starting out, most all cars were built primarily of wood, as that was reasonably light, strong and cheap material. However, aside from wheel spokes, most of the former trees were hidden under body panels, not letting on their knotty nature. One type car eschewed this concealment – the Woody actually celebrating that natural product’s color and texture – and created a category of car that is covetable still to this day.
Over time, the limitations of real wood became more obvious – maintenance, structural strength and cost being the most obvious, forcing manufacturers to evolve the woody into what became as common a suburban sight as empty vodka bottles spilling from over-filled trashcans- the vinyl-clad wood grain station wagon. Over the years, the wood grain appliqué finds its way from Country Squire to portly Pacer, and even onto some foreign jobs which wear the wood with somewhat less comfort than their American neighbors. Still, no matter the car, wood seems to look good.
And then something happened, much like to the once equally common vinyl roofs, wood grain on wagons disappeared as a factory option. Oh sure, station wagons also almost totally disappeared, but that doesn’t mean that their replacement mini vans and then SUVs couldn’t also get wood. In fact, the first generation of Chrysler’s  category defining and station wagon death-knelling mini vans had a wood appliqué option for a while there.
These days, that’s not so much. And that’s a sad thing in my book. A whole generation of kids is growing up and going to soccer practice and school in vehicles that lack any kind of outward visual nod to nature. Oh sure, there are leaf-emblazoned hybrids, but how jaunty do they look? So, the question is, should wood grain on wagons – or anything else with four wheels – once again be an option for those of us who go ape over ash, and appreciate an orgy of oak? Or, like Yugos and parachute pants, is that something that should remain in the past?
Image source: [OldParkedCars.com]