Today’s Subaru car company started with small motorcycles, and from the 1960s on, it added cars to its production program. Today, Subaru is mainly known for the production of cars with four-wheel drive and “boxers”, i.e. flat engines with counter-rotating pistons, which have brought the factory success in the world of motorsport. At the turn of the century, Subaru Impreza specials were among the fastest rally cars in the world.
The car company – but not only – was born on the ruins of the Nakajima factory, which during the Second World War produced, for example, the best Japanese fighter of the second half of the conflict, the Ki-84 Hayate. The company, which supplied the Imperial Air Force and Navy with a wide range of fighters, bombers, transport aircraft or proven engines, was founded in 1918 and was the first Japanese airplane factory.
Photo: Subaru
Subaru 360
But after the defeat of Japan, the country was not allowed to develop or manufacture aircraft, and Nakajima broke up into a number of smaller factories, which were taken over by their former employees. Thanks to this, experienced technicians and engineers started the Japanese automobile industry.
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Individual companies often bore the name of Japan’s highest mountain, Fuji, and in mid-1953 five of them merged into a new company, named (in the English version) Fuji Heavy Industries (FHI). As early as 1946, Fuji Sangyo created the first means of transport, the Rabbit scooter, which, like the Italian Vespa that was a few months younger, was inspired by the small motorcycles used by American soldiers during the Second World War. The scooter, which was produced until 1968 and received technical innovations over the years, such as an electric starter or an automatic transmission, but represented only the first step.
A year after the founding of Fuji Heavy Industries, the company came out with its first car, the Subaru 1500, but it turned out to be more of a dead end in its time. In the end, only 20 units of the four-door sedan were produced, and although it was a success with users, including taxi drivers, it ultimately did not see serial production. At the same time, the Toyota and Prince factories (one of Nissan’s predecessors) were also preparing similar cars, and the management of FHI, fearing the necessary costly and uncertain investments in production equipment, decided to head in a different direction.
Photo: Subaru
Subaru 1000
The second car with the Subaru brand – which, among other things, is the Japanese name for the Pleiades constellation, which the factory still has in its emblem – was the tiny city car Subaru 360. A two-door small car of the specific Japanese kei car category, which began production in 1958 (just two years later, Mazda came with a similar R360 car, for example), somewhat reminiscent of a cross between a Fiat 500 and a Volkswagen Beetle. The rear axle of the three-meter-long and 130-centimeter-wide vehicle was also driven by a rear-mounted two-stroke in-line two-cylinder with a volume of 356 cubic centimeters.
The Subaru 360 was produced until 1971 and a total of over 390,000 left the factory gates, of which several tens of thousands were exported to Australia and even the United States. At that time, in addition to the kei car (which it still produces today, but now these are rebranded Daihatsu models), the factory also serially produced the first “real car”, the Subaru 1000, introduced in October 1965. A liter sedan (and eventually a coupe or station wagon) with a drive front wheels got a drive unit with counter-rotating pistons under the hood. Boxer engines are still a hallmark of the Subaru brand.
Photo: Subaru
Subaru Leone 4WD
Six years later came the successor of the 1000 model and its facelifted version FF-1, for which the factory chose the Italian name Leone. And the “lion” became another breakthrough Subaru, because it was the first to receive four-wheel drive in 1972, when Japan hosted the Winter Olympics in Sapporo.
Until then, the “four-wheel drive” – if you look at the small-series British Jensen FF – was the domain of off-road cars, where the front axle was usually connected to the permanently driven rear axle. But the Japanese engineers went about it exactly the opposite, the front-mounted boxer drove the front wheels and, if necessary, the rear wheels were engaged with a lever.
Photo: Subaru
The designation “symmetrical” for all-wheel drive of Subaru cars means that the crankshaft, transmission, cardan shaft and rear differential, or in the case of the e-Boxer hybrid, the electric motor and battery are also located in the longitudinal axis of the car, and on both sides of it there are the same connecting rods, pistons and half-shafts.
The first version of the solution, which is known today as symmetrical all-wheel drive, gained great popularity in the mountains of Switzerland or American Colorado, in addition to increased passability, it also offered a low center of gravity and optimal weight distribution thanks to the boxer. In sum, this meant unique driving characteristics. In 1986 – six years after Audi offered the Quattro model with permanent four-wheel drive – Subaru also came up with a permanent “four-wheel drive”. The first model with this technology was the aerodynamic coupe Subaru XT, later the rest of the production line also got it (the exception was small cars and mainly kei cars with a front engine and front axle drive).
Photo: Subaru
At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s came two extremely popular models that Subaru still produces today: a large sedan and also a Legacy station wagon (1989), and especially the successor to the Leon named the Impreza (1992). An increased version of the Legacy called the Outback introduced in 1996 was one of the predecessors of today’s extremely popular SUVs, the second car was indelibly written in the hearts of rally fans. Colin McRae, Richard Burns and Petter Solberg won three world championship titles behind the wheel of the Subaru Impreza WRC special in 1995, 2001 and 2003. In 2008, however, Subaru withdrew from the championship, citing the global economic crisis.
The car company (since 2017 the parent company FHI has also carried its name) is linked to the mammoth Toyota, which owns a fifth of the shares and whose Daihatsu brand provides Subaru with the basis for its kei cars, but otherwise it stands somewhat aside due to the technology used. That is, with the exception of the BRZ coupe, which is the twin of the Toyota GR86. In recent years, its annual sales have been around 800,000 cars (before covid it was over a million), the largest market is the USA, where over half a million Subaru cars were sold last year. For comparison, roughly 17,000 cars found buyers in Europe. Almost 900 new Subaru cars were registered in the Czech Republic last year.
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2023-07-15 04:01:24
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