1978 Subaru BRAT, a Genre-Bending Four-Seat Not-Quite Pickup

Car and Driver

22-05-2025

From the February 1978 issue of Car and Driver.
The weird little Subaru rocketed over the crest and launched itself into space, and as all four wheels left the ground, what had seemed like harmless fun only a few mo­ments ago turned into a pretty dumb way to get terrified. Yes, there's that peculiar, familiar old feeling in the pit of your stom­ach when you realize you're in real trouble but that there's no turning back. Just as it dawns on the destroyer captain a few mi­croseconds before he rams the U-boat that there's a chance he might screw up and sink his own ship in the process, the only thing left to do is ride it out. Go with the flow, even if the thing has no roll bar and you've got no helmet. Nice work, stupid.
On the other hand, that's what this was all about. Subaru is supplementing its line with a secret new recreational vehicle called the BRAT, they told me, so go out to Palm Springs and get crazy with it. Since getting crazy with oddball cars isn't a wholly unusual pastime with me, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but as I trucked into Coin Capital of the Desert, I wondered just how crazy you can get in a foot of sand with only 65 horsepower.
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Upon arrival at Subaru's makeshift press headquarters I had fully expected to find some bizarre clown car because we had been forewarned what BRAT stood for: Bi-drive Recreational All-terrain Trans­porter, assuming you slur the letters to­gether and squint your eyes a little. But when I wheeled John Buttera's fenderless '29 Model-A highboy roadster into the posh racquet club replete with hip young waiters, there on dis­play was a stand of surprisingly good-looking mini-trucks. Aside from the dumb-­looking mud flaps on all four corners and a pair of bucket seats bolted awkwardly onto the cargo bed, the BRAT actually ap­peared to be a stylish imported pickup. As I found out, at Subaru, appearances can be deceiving.
You didn't have to be Charlie Chan to notice the Subaru people twitching when­ever anyone referred to the BRAT as a truck. At the preview breakfast they took time to explain that the four-wheel drive system was intended for snowy streets or dirt driveways, not off-road. And with that they loaded us into a bevy of BRATs and headed us out for a full day of off-roading.
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That night around the pool it took some serious big-city investigative reporting in conjunction with a half dozen well-placed margaritas to get one Subaru type to cut loose with the real story. The import duty on trucks is 25 percent while duty on "four-wheel drive on-highway passenger cars, new" is only three percent. Which ex­plains why the BRAT looks like the 4WD station wagon with the roof cut off. It is.
Subaru, of course, is best remembered for those little 360-cc "egg cars" Malcolm Bricklin imported that were last seen wind­ing their two-cycle two-cylinder engines to a painful death on some PG-rated South­ern California bumper-car track. You might even go so far a to think of Subaru as Japan's answer to Studebaker, although lately, of course, Subaru has been doing just fine, even if it is tucked into the shad­ow of Datsun and Toyota. Subaru sales jumped 66 percent in the first two-thirds of 1977, passing Fiat and making it the fifth largest auto importer in this country. Of course, you've got to remember that the Japanese auto industry as a whole was up the same percentage in that period as far as imports to this country were concerned. Just how much weird cars had to do with Subaru's success was what I was here to find out.
Moment of truth number one came on Monday morning when a train of BRATs caravanned out to what was purported to be the biggest pile of sand in the area. Off-road oldie Bill Stroppe had been hired to lay out a challenging, yet not too tough course where the press types could flog the BRAT without getting into too much trou­ble. Bill Sanders, editor of Four Wheeler and I sat in the back of the line and watched as five different BRATs tried to scale a long, sandy incline that marked the start of the course. When they all gave up and went around to the other side of the hill for the easy way up the gentler road, we let some air out of the tires and gave the hill a banzai charge in the best Gonzo go-for-the-throat style. To wit: Plunk it into four-wheel-drive, put it in first gear and leave it there, push the pedal down as far as it will go and don't lift, regardless. Despite the fact that the 1595-cc OHV pan­cake four-banger screamed a bit and sounded as if it was going to cough a con­necting rod, the BRAT clawed, scratched, and bounced its way to the top with C/D's own beloved Turtle Wrangler in complete control.
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Alone at the top we pressed on and soon found that second gear effectively cuts the torque multiplication in half, which flat isn't enough if you're in the soft stuff. Keep the revs up and above all, don't stop. This was no Jeep CJ-7 we had.
Still, aside from one detour in which I cleverly turned out of the tracks and im­mediately sank the BRAT to its front hubs in the soft sand, the thing proved amazing­ly tractable. This may be due to the fact that the BRAT weighs just 2145 pounds wet, thanks, in part, to the aluminum en­gine and transmission. Light weight may mean good fuel economy numbers on the highway, but in the dirt it means that the thing doesn't want to sink quite as deep in the sand. Putting the engine ahead of the front transaxle helps on the uphill stretches as well, since the normal weight transfer from front to rear axle is reduced.
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Obstacle number two was not the deeply rutted and bumpy section that caused the BRAT to pitch from side to side rather brusquely, but the Japanese film crew standing in the way. The fact that they not only didn't speak English but were also not acquainted with the rule of off-road driv­ing that says "never stop unless you are pointing downhill or are on solid ground" didn't help matters, but a universal under­standing of the meaning of a vehicle careening directly toward you with the horn locked full on helped resolve the situation at the last second.
On the downhills, all you've got to re­member is to stay off the brakes, leave it in low and let engine braking do the job. One BRAT-ful of neophytes either forgot or never knew in the first place. They rolled their Subaru, instantly making it a 4x4 convertible. More nice work from the press crew.
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Just to make sure that we were giving the BRAT a full measure of punishment I had imported a ringer for our photo ses­sion. Danny Thompson works for SCORE, prepares off-road race cars for his dad Mickey Thompson, and does a fair share of off-road racing himself. He's young enough to have no fear yet experienced enough to know when to lift. And he loves to bounce around inside a 4x4. Thompson is your typical Southern California kid.
There was one portion of the course which approximated a sine wave, some­thing the off-road racers call the "Oh­-shits." The name derives from the fact that every time the vehicle crunches down on top of the curve, bottoming out the suspen­sion, you think every bolt is going to snap. And guess what you say to yourself? Going through this corrugated stuff with Thomp­son Jr. at the wheel is like being in an all­-day plane crash.
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Under his delicate ministrations, the BRAT's air cleaner kept coming loose and falling forward into the fan, making a sound like a plastic woodpecker, and a me­tallic ticking began to emanate from the engine as if something internal was con­tacting the flywheel. But we pressed on be­cause we knew the BRAT was made of sterner stuff. And besides, we still hadn't really begun to get even a little crazy.
After several trouble-free laps around the course, I managed to get the BRAT stuck atop the first long hill when I drove into a gaping hole and high-centered. But eventually, with Danny driving and me hanging off the rear bumper to teeter the BRAT so the right rear wheel touched the ground, we drove it out of trouble.
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The consensus, so far, was that Subaru had done a fine job of making a four-wheel vehicle that worked well off-road even if it wasn't supposed to go there, and even if it is identical to the standard (read "cramped and plastic") car up front. And although it really isn't a mini-truck (even with the rear-facing bucket seats removed, the box has precious little room), the Datsun, [Chevy] LUV, Toyota, Mazda, and [Ford] Courier pickups are going to have a difficult time providing a four-wheel-drive unit to compete with BRAT's on a weight and price basis. Because the Subaru is front-wheel drive to start with, the standard five-speed gearbox is used with fifth being changed to an in­-out gear to kick the driveshaft in for four­-wheel-drive. That means no transfer case. And with a base price of just $4249, the BRAT has got to be the cheapest way to go four wheelin'. (And, while fuel economy is not an attribute normally asso­ciated with 4x4's, the EPA rates the BRAT at 26 city mpg and 36 highway.) It should be your basic smash hit in California where the off-road trip is only a short ride from anywhere. So Subaru has done it again. Hot on the heels of its four-wheel-drive station wagon, it has created another vehi­cle that has no competition.
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But we're drifting off the subject, which is achieving craziness in the desert. Subaru had Stroppe prep eight special BRAT's with roll bars and wide tires for a special dust-bowl timed competition. Since there were so many press types, two-man teams were arranged and I got matched with an ad sales flack who was as checked-out on off-road driving as any 19th Century may­or of Hong Kong. The result was that by the halfway point our BRAT had course marker ribbons flying from the bumper and front fender, and a cardboard sign wedged under the windshield wiper. I kept yelling at him to keep the throttle down­—"You're doing fine!"—but when he rolled the right-front tire off the rim it was no go. As we stopped to change the tire, we no­ticed the course was dotted with clapped-­out BRATs with various maladies, and when I finally got my turn there wasn't much left in the way of equipment; the sand and standard press misuse had fried the clutch. But there was one bright spot when a Subaru executive shot over the hill near the start/finish line and stormed out of control directly toward the shelter that had been erected to keep the sun off the cold soda, narrowly missing a gaggle of stunned hangers-on. Normally it's the press types who get crazed and endanger the host car makers, but this turnabout kept us amused for the remainder of the day—not to mention putting paid to the rumor that only journalists are nuts.
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The second day of bashing about in the sand drew toward a close, and I was in­creasingly aware that our time was almost up with no genuine craziness erupting to spruce up the action. There was a chance for a last try, though. As I watched lens­man Satterwhite clicking off shots of Thompson thundering over the crest of the hill we had picked for the dreaded "jump shots," I said that I would like to take a lick at getting some daylight under the tires as it looked both fun and easy. Check­ing out Danny's approach down one side of a valley and up the other to the crest, I noted that he ran it through first, second, and broached the peak in third. What I failed to notice was that he let off the throttle and changed direction just before he got to the top of the hill where the road jutted left.
Satterwhite motioned for me to get into our backup BRAT and do some "speed stunts" down in the valley with Danny for the final shots, the last of which called for us to zip down the valley trail in close for­mation making a lot of dust for the cam­era. Knowing that the guy in the back gets all the dust I opted for the lead position, but when I found Danny filling up my rear view mirrors, the old bodily juices started flowing. I knew I wasn't about to let Mick­ey Thompson's kid pass me and this seemed like as good a time as any to to try the jump. Only I didn't bother to slow down or turn because I wanted to make sure the thing got launched.
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The first thing I noticed when I crested the hill was that suddenly there was no ground when I looked out the windows . . . only a really good view of the sky. Then it dawned on me that I was in over my head, but what were my alternatives? Flying the Subaru at the apogee of its trajectory was an odd combination of fun and panic. Do you remember the feeling you get sitting in the back of an airliner when it hits a really good "air pocket?" That sensation tipped me off to the fact that the downward por­tion of our flight had begun, which would soon be closely followed by the loud/pain­ful/awful landing. The realization that the tail end of the BRAT was considerably higher than the nose led me to ponder the possibility that the thing might wedge its snout into the sand and come to an abrupt halt. Or perhaps it would even go "endo," as we used to call end-over-end flips at the drag races. I manfully refused to panic, re­membering the destroyer captain and the need for true craziness.
The area I selected to set the BRAT down in was just sand and pucker bushes, since the road had long since turned left. Because the downward slope of the hill somewhat matched the nose-heavy attitude of the BRAT, the thing just crashed down on all four wheels and everything was won­derful. No pain, just thunk-clang-thunk. The fact that it survived the Cook Death Leap convinced me that it was, if not a taxable mini-truck, at least one fine piece for having off-road fun with, and as we hobbled back to the Subaru compound to check out, I had only one problem with the whole affair.
As far as I can tell, I didn't manage to get into any true craziness.
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Specifications
Specifications
1978 Subaru BRAT
Vehicle Type: front-engine, 4-wheel-drive, 2+2-passenger pickup
PRICE
Base/As Tested: $4209
ENGINE
flat-4, aluminum block and heads
Displacement: 97 in3, 1595 cm3
Power: 65 hp @ 5200 rpm
Torque: 80 lb-ft @ 2400 rpm
TRANSMISSION
4-speed manual
CHASSIS
Suspension, F/R: struts/semi-trailing arms
Brakes, F/R: 9.0-in disc/7.1-in drum
DIMENSIONS
Wheelbase: 96.5 in
Length: 164.8 in
Width: 61.0 in
Height: 56.7 in
Curb Weight: 2145 lb