by Matt — Forget for a second all of the obvious reasons to want a BRAT; the jump seats, the stickers, the 5-speed 4×4 goodness. The real reason to have this Roadkill trucky-type- car-like thing is the dash-knob- activated Cyclops light that flings itself out from behind the Subaru constellation like a disproportionately sized shooting […]
The Subaru BRAT (Bi-drive Recreational All-terrain Transporter) was a funky little pickup truck owned by a few notable folks over the years, such as Ronald Reagan and Master Rex Kwon Do. Today’s BRAT features the strength of a grizzly, the reflexes of a puma, and the wisdom of a man. Get ready to drop some […]
The Subaru Leone (Italian for Lion) was a compact econobox manufactured by Fuji Heavy Industries from 1971 to 1994 and marketed as the DL in the USA. Like most Subarus, it was powered by a flat-4 engine and was available in multiple body configurations including the funky-cool El Camino style BRAT (Bi-drive Recreational All-terrain Transporter)…but […]
It is always interesting when a seller uses the wording; 99% rust free. As an engineer by trade I instantly make the assumption that this means the car must be composed of 1% rust by mass. If you’ve got a 2500 lb Subaru, this means you have 25 lbs of iron oxide in your car’s […]
The Subaru BRAT (Bi-drive Recreational All-terrain Transporter) is a ute (El Camino) version of the Leone passenger sedan. The Brat came new with two jump seats in the back…not designed for your brats, but designed to help Subaru evade the infamous Chicken tax (a 25% import duty on light trucks- adding the rear facing seats […]
It has been a long Labor Day. Too much food, drinks, family and loony cars all over the normally sane pages of Daily Turismo. This next feature needs no long and meandering soliloquy/introduction other than to state this is possibly the third most dangerous thing to come from Japan, the first is the actual Godzilla […]
In 1977 Subaru introduced an El Camino version of its Leone family sedan and called it the Bi-drive Recreational All-terrain Transporter or BRAT. The BRAT featured a set of rear facing plastic jump seats to avoid the so called Chicken Tax, which is actually a US Tariff on light trucks that originally started when France […]
The Subaru Brat was the closest thing to a Japanese El Camino available for sale in the United States and Subaru did sell quite a few of them from 1978 through 1993. They were quite useful little off-roaders and were owned by a few celebrities, most notably Ronald Reagan and Master Rex Kwon Do from […]