Things Wheel Around

A very strange thing is arriving at Subaru dealers. Strange, that is, for Subaru. How about a front-wheel-drive Subaru? This is something akin to a two-wheel-drive Land Rover – in that every Subaru car Subaru has sold for decades ( save one, the BRZ, which is a sports car) has come standard with all-wheel-drive.

To parody Rudolf Hess at Nuremberg: AWD is Subaru, just as Subaru is AWD!

Or at least, it was.

Subaru’s newest model – the Uncharted – is a front-wheel-drive EV. It is FWD because that is how Subaru keeps its base price under $40k. The FWD iteration of this new device lists for $36,445 but if you want AWD, the price jacks up to $41,245. That’s a lot to pay for a small Subaru crossover – at least relative to other small Subarus such as the Crosstrek, which is about the same size and generally similar in terms of its shape and so on but very much not the same in that it comes standard with AWD and its base price is $26,995.

The Crosstrek can also be driven about 500 miles on a tankful. The Uncharted touts a best-case driving range on a fully charged battery of about 300 miles. But the biggest difference between these two Soobies is that one of them isn’t really. Not if you base what a thing is on that thing being something different than other things.

Subarus are defined by two things that have made them different from other brand vehicles, one of them being standard AWD. It is true that most other brands also offer AWD and many of these other-brand models come standard with it. But it was Subaru that was the first to make AWD standard across the board in mass-market vehicles (Audi was another AWD pioneer, but Audi is a luxury brand and you paid top-dollar to get one – and still do – whereas most people used to be able to afford a new Subaru.)

The other thing Subarus had – note the past tense – as a given standard feature that set them apart from other-brand vehicles was a horizontally opposed engine. In popular lingo, a “flat” or “boxer” engine vs. one that has its cylinders in a row or mounted in a V. The only other vehicle manufacturer that sold cars with boxer engines was (and still is) Porsche, which is also an exclusive manufacturer. Subaru’s boxer engines were put in affordable cars, enabling people who couldn’t afford a Porsche to own a car with a boxer engine. Subaru also used to sell both four and six cylinder boxer engines, but is now only selling four cylinder boxer engines because six cylinder boxer engines became too difficult to make as compliant engines.

Now Subaru is trying to sell Subarus without engines, at all – for compliance reasons – and the latest one hasn’t even got standard AWD!

Is that a Subaru? If it is, does it mean anything that has a “Subaru” badge is one? If it does, then what isn’t a Subaru? Or anything else, for that matter?

You might call this the Doppelgänger Effect. Maybe Triplegänger Effect is better. As in, you’ve seen one crossover-shaped EV, you’ve seen all three. Or four. Or six. This isn’t an asset for brands that relied on being different in meaningful ways. For example, Volvo used to be the safe car brand. Volvos were first to come standard with three-point (lap and shoulder) seat belts and the company touted that its cars were designed to protect the occupants in the event of a crash. But when the federal government decreed that every new vehicle must come standard with three-point seat belts and protect the occupants in the event of a crash, Volvos became pretty much the same as other brands of cars. Volvo doesn’t sell as many cars as it used to, probably for just that reason. Because it is harder to sell the same thing everyone else is selling, packaged (and priced) differently.   

That brings up the other thing.

This new “Subaru” – without an engine and without standard AWD – has a base price that’s $10,000 higher than the otherwise similar (size, shape) Crosstrek that is very identifiably Subaru because it has a boxer engine and comes standard with AWD. Is Subaru about to make the same mistake that Dodge did when it replaced the Charger’s engine with a battery and electric motors and increased the base price by $20,000? People stopped buying Chargers because (a) the people who buy cars like the Charger want engines and (b) they’re not going to pay $20k more for a battery and motors.

The good news – for Subaru – is that the Uncharted is just one of two “electrified” Subarus on the roster; the rest are still Subarus.

But they almost weren’t.

Subaru – like a number of other brands – had intended to go full-electric, on the theory that it is better to go along in order to get along (with the regs, that is). But then along came Trump, who dialed them back – just in time for Subaru (and other brands) to find themselves having to sell “electrified” things for which there’s no longer a market. 

No doubt Subaru assumed that the $7,500 tax refund would still be in place; if it were still in place, then a new Uncharted would only cost a little more than a new Crosstrek rather than $10k more. But the tax refund is gone and – along with it – the likelihood that Subaru will sell more than a handful of Uncharteds.

Probably at – ahem – fire sale prices. 

Just ask Dodge. Or Ford or VW or Mercedes – about uncharted waters.

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