Shooting-brake

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Shooting-brake is a car body style originally used to describe bespoke versions of 2-door luxury estate cars built for use by hunters^[1]. In modern usage "Shooting-brake" generally refers to any 2-door hatchback with a squared-off rear, although some manufacturers have referred to other types of vehicles as a "Shooting-brake"^[2]. The body was usually custom built. An early manufacturer of shooting brakes was Albion Motors of Scotland. There are existing examples of custom-built Bentley S2, Mercedes 300, and also the Aston Martin DBS Shooting Brake. VG, a small US coachbuilder, offers a model named VGD Shooting Brake. Some modern manufacturers, such as Audi, have recently referred to some concept cars as shooting brakes, although today the term may be used to refer to any estate car and in Europe some motor manufacturers refer to the estate bodies of their line-up as the brake or break - the spelling depending on the country. The Ford Scorpio was a modern example of this usage.

History

A brake, also known as a break, was a type of horse-drawn carriage used in the nineteenth and early 20th centuries. It was a large or small, open-topped vehicle with four wheels and designed for country use . The form usually met, the "shooting brake", was designed to carry the driver and a gamekeeper at the front, facing forward and up to six sportsmen on longditudinal benches, with their dogs, guns and game carried alongside in slat-sided racks. In the early 19th century, a break was a large carriage-frame with no body, used for "breaking in" young horses. By the late 19th century the meaning had been extended to also mean a large waggonette.