This blue gen2 Subaru GL AWD wagon is parked just around the corner from my house, and is owned by one of the daughters that has moved back in with their elderly parents, who were clearly hippies in their day. Subaru wagons are everywhere now; meaning all over the country. But back in the 70s and early 80s, Oregon was one of the early hot beds for them, along with Vermont, Northern California, and Colorado. That’s back when they were closely associated with the Birkenstock-granola crowd, but now almost everyone eats granola and Birkies long ago went mainstream.
So it goes with so much of what was once called hippie-culture; it inevitably goes mainstream. Who’s going to buy a kombucha brewer first; Pepsi or Coke? (Update: Pepsi bought KeVita for $200 million in 2016). We’re all hippies driving Subarus now.
Well that should set off some howls of protest from this crowd.
Back to cars. Well, it’s hard to separate cars from their drivers, and very few cars have had their owners stereotyped more than Subaru, although that’s essentially over now, thanks to the brand’s huge growth. But back in 1983, when this GL found a home in Oregon, it was a different ball game.
This is a pretty well-kept example of this generation, sold from 1980 through 1984. And they’re getting mighty thin on the ground, despite their intrinsic ruggedness. Thirty-four years will do that. But I’m hoping this one sticks around for a while.
Cool looking car.crashing one is not recommended.
The newer ones are very very safe though. One was rear ended really hard by a delivery truck near me, and the back doors still opened and closed fine. And I think I heard (here?) that rescue crews are instructed to cut around the roof of Subies instead of through the b pillar because it’s too strong for the jaws of life.
Yep, here’s mine from a few years back. All the doors still opened. Car was a total loss. Check out the F150 that hit it…
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/uncategorized/coal-2014-subaru-outback-3-6r-limited-oh-we-hardly-knew-ye/
I will freely admit however that I am very happy we were in that car rather than the early ’80’s version. Things would likely have turned out worse.
Especially after a few winters on salted roads. I swear, they made them out of Alka-Seltzer.
In 1989 I was selling Subarus in a Virginia college town. The Loyale wagons that hadn’t sold the previous winter were rusting by August.
For years, it was a frustrating paradox that many of the cars with the best winter handling characteristics did not stand up to winter driving, at least anywhere salt was used. Corvairs and VW Beetles, for example.
SO true ! .
I remember some snowy road trips in Vermont mountains in our then new 1967 VW Typ III Squareback, fully loaded, we’d go up slowly but Mom passed everything else on the road going down the other side and scared the crap out of me .
I really like this color .
I’d prolly like a Subie one day when I can’t keep my oldies running anymore .
My Son has had several and they’re all great little cars, worlds away from this one tho’ ~ he has a WRX wagon Hot Rodded .
-Nate
My one friend was given one of these to drive in high school by his parents. I remember having to teach him to drive stick in it – I guess since it was an old beater by that point, his parents didn’t care if the the clutch or the transmission blew up 🙂
3 of my 4 sisters own Subarus, 1 is on her 2nd while another is on her 3rd. One sister is on her 1st Subaru and it will be her last.
I rode in the generation of wagon that preceded the one written about here, it felt like I was riding in a metal box.
Like Hyundai, Subaru has come a very long way from it’s debut models.
In parts of the country where Subarus were less common in the 1970s and early 1980s, I wonder if they were associated with hippies much at all — or just considered yet another odd foreign car?
Part of why I wonder this is because my parents (we lived in Philadelphia) bought a 1980 Subaru GL 4WD wagon. They bought it for the 4WD, since we’d recently moved into a house with a long, steep driveway. I don’t recall anyone associating Subarus with hippies at the time, but I do recall my parents’ friends and neighbors being genuinely impressed by the 4WD and puzzled by oddities like the spare tire mounted in the engine bay and the third headlight.
Unfortunately, their Subaru was a terrible car, and its frequent breakdowns led to my folks fighting regularly over what to do with it. But it wasn’t until the late 1980s that I heard of an association between Subarus and hippies… again, maybe I just wasn’t paying attention to that stuff when I was 10 years old, but I’m also suspecting that the association wasn’t as widespread as it is now, or as prevalent as it might have been in, say, Vermont.
Third headlight…? What third headlight?
This third headlight which hides behind a flip-up badge. A factory fitting and very cool.
Yeah, it was considered a “passing light” if I recall correctly, flash to pass and the badge would flip up and reveal the illuminated Cyclops eyeball. My brother had a new one of these in 1981, plaid upholstery and all!
It was a cool ride because of its quirkiness but all in all, not much of a car. By 50,000 miles it drove and sounded like a pea thrasher and its off road capability was modest at best.
The third headlight was discontinued after 1982 (when Subaru switched to the slightly lower grille with quad headlights), so Paul’s featured car does not have it. On the pre-’82 GL’s, the Subaru emblem in the grille looks unusually big and clunky, and that’s because it’s hinged at the top, and flips out of the way to reveal the “third eye.”
My parents never used the third headlight in actual driving situations, but when the car was new, they showed it off to just about everyone.
It amazes me that you did not know about Subaru’s driving light which was intended as a long range beam to light a little further down the road than the high beams.
Of course the fact is that many never used them at all and I bet many didn’t even know that they had it.
I know, I was shocked as well that Daniel Stern, the lighting master, didn’t know of the Cyclops light feature on older Subarus! Need to start selling bulbs in 3-packs…
The third headlight ran into legal trouble in some states (as had Plymouth’s “Super Lite” a decade earlier) in states that didn’t allow any more than 2 standard headlights and an optional two standardized lamps for high-beam use only. In these states, the center light was disabled and the cover permanently shut, or the light not installed, can’t remember.
Well they did a great job of hiding it behind the badge and since it wasn’t supposed to be used around town I don’t know if I’ve ever come across one in the wild that was using it. I came across it doing some sort of work under the hood of one. I looked down and went what the heck, that looks like a light, but it is behind the badge??? Oh look something that looks like it moves the badge out of the way. So of course I had to drop what I was doing, get in the car, turn on the key and figure out where the switch was located and see it in action.
Occasionally someone shows me a post-1939 car light technology I wasn’t aware of. 🙂
Occasionally someone shows me a post-’39 car light technology I wasn’t aware of. 🙂
Not entirely relevant as it’s non-US, but to me in Scotland, that generation of Subaru is associated with farmers and rural vets.
Hippies? They probably were in 2CVs, or some ancient Land Rover or Morris Traveller, or on a bus.
I had one of these for a while (i guess I get to say that fairly often huh?) and recall it turning over 200k miles while somewhat sluggishly but with plenty of joie de vivre pulling us up the Sierra’s for a day of snowboarding.
Great car, lots of character and personalit, unfortunately becoming rarer and rarer finds. As are its successor, the Loyale series, for that matter especially the mid-80’s years.
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/cars-of-a-lifetime/coal-1982-subaru-dl-4wd-wagon-like-the-energizer-bunny/
Nothing says “counterculture” like a car built in the middle of Indiana. 🙂
It is a little-known fact (even within Indiana) that the Subaru plant (Subaru-Isuzu at the time) near Lafayette, Indiana came to be located along State Road 38. Which was also designated as the Bataan Memorial Highway. Irony?
Subaru Corporation was formerly known as Fuji Heavy Industries, which traces IT’S roots to the Nakajima Aircraft Company. Warbird fanatics will know the names of their products as Tojo, Frank, Rufe, Kate, Jill and Oscar.
Irony Indeed.
In the early 2000s Subaru introduced the “spread wings grille” in tribute to their aeronautical history.
First seen on the R1 and R2 kei cars, then Imprezza and Tribeca.
(Thanks Wikipedia)
Not to mention Jerry Della Femina’s ad campaign for Subaru entitled, “From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor”.
He wrote a book which includes the story of it…https://www.amazon.com/Those-Wonderful-Folks-Pearl-Harbor/dp/0671205714
Wouldn’t that be Mitsubishi?
These were nice-looking wagons and a major improvement over their prececessors. But having said that, if I’d been looking for a 4WD wagon in the early ’80s I would have been cross-shopping the AMC Eagles.
My grandparents had 2 hatchbacks and were quite a bit too old to have been hippies. I’ve seen 3 different subarus of this gen in the last 1 and a half or so years after not seeing one in a long time.
I also remember when this bodystyle first came out, and the cheers from nearly everyone. The 1974 body had not been elegant to start with, and Subie continually beat it with the ugly stick as the 70s marched on,
Subies were vigorous rusters too. I saw an FF-1G when it was only about 4 years old. The rocker panels were completely gone. My Aunt’s 87 Loyale had extensive rust by 98, especially the rear wheel arches. The car barely made it to 100K, in spite of good maintenance, and the quantities of vital humor it leaked were such that the rust was the least of it’s problems. The 98 Civic that followed it was vastly better.
My ’83 Subie GL 2wd Wagon finally died at 187,000 miles. A CPU blew and the cost to fix it was more than the car was worth. The corpse was used as a trade for a new 92 Justy, since I needed transportation immediately and the payment was less than $150 a month. Good times and lots of road trips in that wagon, which usually hauled my family and our best friends to conventions with the rear so packed with gear that the window was obscured. Thank goodness the spare was over the engine.
The weak point was the CV joints. I had four failures between them in the 100,000 miles that I had it.
Every time I read a post discussing the development of Subaru as a national brand, I experience a haunted feeling of “what if” about Saab. Those Birkenstock Vermonters driving Subarus in the 80s were Saab customers in the 60s – 70s.
Saab chose to chase BMW, instead of choosing to expand the old customer base with cars that built on the reputation of all-weather ruggedness and rally capability exemplified by the 96. I think a next-gen 96, updated and less off-putting to American tastes – with 4 wheel drive, ample ground clearance, priced right – might have found a niche that would have allowed Saab to survive as an independent.
The “Saab-aru” was a badge job, but it made complete sense from a brand/identity perspective.
I’m a little shaky on Subaru history, but I’m thinking they weren’t really AWD cars yet, but still had the part-time 4WD feature, though I could be wrong about that. I seem to remember borrowing a friend’s Brat and being told not to engage 4WD on dry pavement. I do definitely remember when Gen 2 appeared, and I was struck by how oddly French they looked. The next remake was much sleeker, and more people who were neither hippies nor skiers started buying them; a friend of ours bought a Legacy wagon (the less-macho twin to the Outback) and we put a lot of pleasant miles riding around in it.
My first Subie was a ’90s Justy, not with 4WD. The head fell apart from corrosion almost immediately, so my introduction to that 1.2 liter 3-cylinder mill was a partial rebuild. My friend Bob, an excellent amateur mechanic, gave me a shopping list of parts for the good used head I’d found, and then rebuilt it on his kitchen counter one evening while watching “Monday Night Football”. He and I managed to get everything back together and running despite that ghastly “electric” carburetor, and as my employer had shut the Nashville office and moved back to Bowling Green, my last month of work for them involved a daily commute. Even with the long uphill grade on the route the Justy could make it door to door in about 45 minutes, getting almost 40 mpg along the way.
Our current Beast of Burden is a 2001 Forester, which could not get 40mpg if every road were downhill, but it’s a worthy critter anyway. Both comfortable and remarkably agile, almost as good in the bends as my Alfa Milano, it will turn over 200K next week sometime. And Okay, I DID used to be a hippie, but that was a hell of a lot of haircuts ago.
Yes the early Subies were 4WD complete with a lever to engage the rear axle, then it was a button to engage before they went to AWD.
And yes, they’re gas hogs for a 4 cyl car with similar mileage to a type 1 beetle despite having today’s engine management computers.
The earlier Subarus were either rear wheel drive kei cars or FWD subcompacts with flat four engines.
Definitely uncommon these days. I’ve seen one of the 3-door hatches of this generation around town a couple of times (and those were made longer, holding down the cheap end of the line until ’87 or ’88), but quite a while since I’ve spotted a wagon.
The coupes of this generation were actually quite attractive, with a late example of a true hardtop design.
Ive always liked this era of Subies. The scaled down white 8 spoke wheels as well as the tubular bumpers and aux lights these sometimes wore made them seem like shrunken, entry level versions of the more popular Jeep CJs, RamChargers, Scouts, Broncos etc that were also available at this time. Nothing ‘hippie’ about that. Once the Outback came out…oh yeah.
Id never heard of a Subaru anything until Schaper’s battery operated 4×4’s became a HUGE craze in the early 80s. I had a handful of them myself including a CJ-7, a baja bug, AMC SX/4 and a few others. But I remember the commercial with this guy doing an Evel Kneivel over a row of other Stompers. In those days, I also wanted the big block BRAT, but never scored it. This is how Ive always viewed the early Subies.
I always suspected these were designed as a wagon, BRAT (despite its’ late arrival) and hatchback first, with the sedan and hardtop coupe as afterthoughts.
Lots of these in Minneapolis too. But the local dealer must have made the “cow-catcher” a pseudo-mandatory accessory, because to me the car looks wrong without one.
Paul,
Just for the fun of it I ran a Carfax on this Subaru using the OR tag number.
It is indeed a 1983. And judging from the Carfax, it remarkably is still with its original owner and has spent most of its life in Eugene. It has around 178k miles.
I remember when these wagons in 2WD and 4WD were common in my neck of the woods, but the majority of them rusted to bits by the early 1990s. I am only seeing one very well preserved 1981 sedan in Barbados now – don’t know if there are any wagons of this vintage hiding out in someone’s garage.
Don’t forget that what helped put them on the map in their target market was their sponsorship of the US Ski Team.
I own such gen2 Subaru GL , anywhere can get front corner lights?