Four decades have passed since Mercedes-Benz launched the first E-class wagon, the T-Modell version of the W123 generation. The longroof E-class survives today, and its very existence remains a curious piece of Benz’s American-market puzzle. After all, no other automaker has so consistently offered a wagon of this size and class in the United States—we’re looking at you, Audi and BMW—and even Volvo has had gaps in its history.



The E-class wagon has thus become one of the most revered products in the Mercedes portfolio, and the automaker tells us that its longroof owners are among its most loyal and most wealthy. But there’s a subset among these buyers that pushes those maximums even further: those moneyed, discerning few who step up for the high-performance models built by the carmaker’s AMG subsidiary. AMG first offered the special-order AMG E-class wagon in 1987—and even then, not officially—when a customer commissioned a single North America–spec “Hammer” wagon. Built by an independent shop in Westmont, Illinois, which at the time was effectively AMG’s U.S. headquarters, that first wagon laid the foundation for later, even wilder (and more official) AMG station wagons based on the E-class. Read on for those models’ histories: