I've been wondering about that for decades. 
When I was school-age, I was friends with a kid who was into hockey along with his brother for most of their growing years. They were on competitive teams and it was a major part of their lives. Their parents had two SUVs which were used multiple times weekly to haul all the gear around.
That's the only time I've known of someone making practical use of these obscenely large and wasteful oil burners. A smaller station wagon would've fit everything though, if you could buy them any more. Roads in the US are congested now with large sedans, those crossover things, and enormous pickup trucks with pristine beds. Cars in the US seem to have trended toward larger sizes in recent decades, smaller station wagons and things like the old Honda Civic or Geo Metro no longer exist (in my opinion the modern Civic is fucking huge and hideous compared to its namesake), and trying to find what was once called a compact/subcompact is impossible these days.