Five strange Subaru facts
Tuesday, 21 November 2017
Subaru has carved out a distinctive niche for itself over the years by pretty much doing things its own way. You don't get to be the world's 22nd largest car manufacturer by following the rules.
Today we bring you five things you probably didn't know about Subaru.
Seven Sisters
It is pretty common knowledge that Subaru's name and logo are both derived from the Pleiades star cluster, which is called Subaru in Japan. The brightest stars in the cluster are known as 'The Seven Sisters' (from Greek mythology), and they make up the Subaru logo.
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But the logo only has six stars because one of the sisters was supposedly invisible. Or because one of the seven stars is difficult to see with the naked eye, depending on which story you believe. To make things even more confusing, the six stars in the Subaru logo, based on the seven brightest stars in the Pleiades cluster, represent the five companies that merged to form Fuji Heavy Industries, Subaru's parent company.
Planes then cars
Much like fellow Japanese car manufacturer Mitsubishi, Subaru has its roots in aircraft manufacture. The Aircraft Research Laboratory that started in 1915 became the Nakajima Aircraft Company in 1932 and built planes for the Japanese war effort during WWII, including the Ki-43 Hayabusa that holds the record for shooting down more Allied planes than any other Japanese fighter.
Nakajima Aircraft was reorganised as Fuji Sangyo after the war, before being split up into 12 different companies in 1950. Between 1953 and 1955 four of these smaller companies and a newly-formed company merged to become Fuji Heavy Industries, which quickly got into car manufacturing and Subaru was born.
First boxer
While Subaru's first proper production car, the tiny 360 (and the Sambar van that was based on it) was a rear-engined, RWD Kei-car powered by an inline two-cylinder engine, the engine Subaru would become famous for didn't appear until 1966 in the nose of the Subaru 1000.
The FWD 1000 was the first Subaru to use a horizontally-opposed boxer engine, more specifically a 997cc water-cooled boxer that produced 41kW. The original intention was for the 1000 to be air-cooled, but because water-cooling not only minimised noise and vibration, and also was far more compact, this idea was abandoned for the production model.
Animated series
Weirdly, in 2011 Subaru teamed up with Japanese anime studio Gainax (creators of arguably the most successful anime series ever; Neon Genesis Evangelion) to produce an animated online series called Hōkago no Pleiades, or 'Wish Upon the Pleiades'.
The series was about a young woman called Subaru who discovers a group of 'magical girls': they transform into witches and a small green blob from Pleiades, who are searching for fragments of the small green blob's spaceship. The original four-part web series was followed by a 12-episode television show in 2015.
Bricklin SV-1
What has the spectacularly unsuccessful V8-powered Bricklin SV-1 go to do with Subaru? Well, the success of Subaru of America essentially funded this ill-advised venture by millionaire Malcolm Bricklin.
Bricklin formed Subaru of America in 1968 and quickly took it public, making it the only publicly traded import car company in the USA. This made Bricklin very rich indeed, so when sold his interest in the company, he used that money to create a 'safe and economical' sports car. The SV stood for Safety Vehicle and while it was indeed very safe, the extra weight added by all the safety equipment meant it was anything but economical. Or sporty. Or reliable.
Less than 3000 cars were built and the company limped into receivership around a year after the SV-1 made its debut.