About Subaru
Subaru is the carmaker that turned a stubborn engineering habit into an identity. Nearly every car it sells pairs a horizontally opposed boxer engine with symmetrical all-wheel drive, a layout that sits low, sounds unmistakable and grips well on a slick hill in February. That recipe made the brand a fixture of New England driveways, Colorado trailheads and Pacific Northwest ski lots, and earned it a loyalty most mass-market makers can only envy. Owners keep these cars for years, cover them in stickers and argue cheerfully about head gaskets.
The company grew out of Fuji Heavy Industries, a postwar descendant of an aircraft builder, and took the Subaru Corporation name only in 2017; the six-star badge depicts the Pleiades star cluster, which is what the word means in Japanese. Its reputation was forged twice: first by practical four-wheel-drive wagons in the 1970s and 1980s, then by the blue-and-gold Imprezas that won the World Rally Championship in the 1990s. Toyota holds a significant minority stake, and the two firms share sports cars, hybrid hardware and electric platforms.
The modern lineup leans on crossovers. The Outback, Forester, Crosstrek and three-row Ascent do most of the selling, while the Impreza, WRX and BRZ keep the enthusiast flame lit, and many American-market Subarus are built in Lafayette, Indiana. The electric turn has come through the Toyota partnership, beginning with the Solterra and widening to the Trailseeker and the smaller Uncharted, while Toyota-derived hybrid systems have arrived in the Forester and Crosstrek. Critics note that the brand was slow to electrify and that some CVT-equipped models feel short of breath.
The Subaru story moves on several fronts at once: new electric models and how they sell, limited-edition WRX and BRZ specials, recalls that occasionally sweep up hundreds of thousands of cars, monthly sales tallies, and the perennial question of whether a manual-gearbox STI will ever return to American showrooms. Price changes, hybrid rollouts and market reports from Australia and Japan round out the picture, along with the occasional classic Subaru doing something improbable in the desert.