Subarus come in all shapes and sizes, as I’m sure we can all agree. But the shape and size that really helped the marque make its mark was the mid-sized wagon. Legacy, Forrester, Impreza – that’s what our mental image of Subaru is, by and large. Yet strangely enough, the one that started it all, the Subaru 1000, is very hard to come by in its native land. I’ve caught a glimpse of only one in three years; never managed to photograph it. But I did find the next best thing…
I’m not sure where this gorgeous Leone wagon came from originally. it’s certainly not a JDM version. The bumpers seem a little too small for a US-spec (though I could be wrong about that), though the side-markers do look pretty American. It could also hail from a bunch of other places – Korea, Europe, the Middle-East… It’s LHD though, so not the UK, NZ, Australia, Indonesia or Thailand.
If you’re going to import a Japanese car back into Japan, you might as well pick one that’s in perfect nick. And has A/C – an absolute necessity, especially with that sticky leatherette upholstery.
Nothing too fancy for the rare seat in this Subie. It reminds me of our family Corolla wagon (a MY 1980) in many ways: adequate but not overly generous legroom; no nonsense wind-up windows and zero frills or armrests. But then, the Leone was a couple rungs below a Cedric/Gloria or a Crown wagon.
Beige in and beige out, just like said Corolla was as well. But the resemblance ends there: Toyota’s grocery-getter was, by that generation, all squared up and ready to enter the ‘80s. This ’79 Subaru, on the other hand, is the final iteration of a body that first came out in late 1971, hence the Coke-bottlesque beltline.
I cannot decide whether early model cars like the one above are better-looking on balance, with their dainty chrome bumpers and somewhat tortured grille.
In Japan, the Leone range was pretty plethoric: the two coupés (a hardtop and a pillared one, top right and bottom right respectively) went on sale first, at the end of 1971; by April 1972, they were joined by two saloons (only the 4-door is pictured here, top left) and the unlikely star of the show, the van/wagon (bottom left), which could be had with its innovative transmission by the end of 1972. Initially, only the wagon was available with the famous 4WD badge; the saloon was only allowed to follow suit in 1975.
Base model JDM vans and saloons initially received a 1.1 litre flat-4 straight out of the Subaru 1000 they replaced, soon updated to a 1.2 litre. For their part, 4WD models, coupés, higher grade saloons and exports had a 1.4 litre engine. The 1.4 replaced the 1.2 and an 87hp 1.6 took over the higher reaches of the range in late 1975 – so that should be what’s in our feature car.
The mid-1977 major facelift generalized the bigger bumpers to all markets and brought about a completely different “American” face. And I quite like the latter change, but the chrome bumpers did look better. In a bid to sustain a modicum of interest in their JDM coupés, Subaru borrowed a name straight out of the Pontiac brochure in 1978. But by the summer of 1979, a completely new Leone took over.
The genesis story behind the Subaru 4WD wagon is one of those butterfly-effect accidents of fate. The Tohoku Electric Company, based in Sendai, used Mitsubishi-made Jeeps to access certain hard-to-reach maintenance and inspection sites, but found that they were too bulky, thirsty and generally difficult to operate compared to smaller cars. In 1968-69, someone at that company asked the local Subaru dealer if a part-time 4WD could be built using a Subaru 1000 light van. The 1000 was Japan’s only FWD mid-sized car at the time and Tohoku’s engineers correctly figured that it would be ideally suited to their needs because of that fact.
The Sendai Subaru dealer took 10 months to hand-build and test the prototype, which met the power company’s brief to a tee. They did send the car over to the mother ship, i.e. Fuji Heavy Industries HQ in Gunma, for an evaluation. Subaru HQ were impressed and decided to put the concept into regular production for the upcoming Leone, thinking it might garner some interest in Japan’s mountainous areas (which is about 80% of the country). It’s perhaps not coincidental that Suzuki also started producing 4x4s around this time – only theirs was a kei-sized Jeep, as opposed to Subaru’s more export-friendly approach.
The Leone was always designed as a FWD car with part-time 4WD. It’s unclear what rear end the Sendai prototype used, but Japanese sources claim that production cars were fitted with the Datsun 510 Bluebird’s IRS and driveshaft. Back in 1968, as part of the Japanese automotive sector’s government-led push for consolidation, Nissan took a 20% stake in Fuji Heavy Industries, so the Datsun parts bin was a logical choice. And it kept the costs reasonable.
It’s fair to say that Subaru were astounded by their 4WD wagon’s success. North America became converts almost immediately and the domestic market was also very keen. It helped that, having more or less stumbled upon this niche by mistake, Subaru found themselves without any serious competitors for the better part of a decade – at least on the aforementioned markets.
Of course, there are a few qualifiers to add here: the Subaru Leone claims to be the first mass-produced mid-sized unit-bodied car with 4WD capabilities, but there were a few forerunners. The crudest examples of these car-sized proto-4WDs simply married a car body with a 4×4 chassis, like the Moskvich 410 (1957-61; top right) and its GAZ-69 underpinnings. Some specialist companies modified production cars – in the ‘30s and ‘40s, Marmon-Herrington worked with Ford (top left). In the ’60, Sinpar did a similar thing with FWD Renaults. A much stranger French design of the period was the 2CV Sahara (1960-66; bottom left), with its two engines – one for each axle. And of course, Jensen (bottom right) pioneered the high-performance AWD coupé in 1966 with their sensational (and very expensive) FF.
Apart from anything else, none of these could be said to be “mass-produced”: a few hundred of each of those were made at most, except the Moskvich, which did crack the 10,000 unit mark, but was not exactly a great export success story. All versions of the Subaru Leone made between 1971 and 1979 came to 400,000 cars – a doubtless significant (but alas unknown) share of which were 4WD.
The fact that someone took the trouble of finding this Subaru overseas (plus my personal empirical observation over the past three years) tells us that there can’t be many first generation JDM Leones still around. Fender mirrors be damned, I’ll take the international version any day, especially in this condition.
Related posts:
Cars Behind Bars: 1976 Subaru DL Wagon – Getting A Little Thin On Top, by Actually Mike
COAL: 1979 Subaru 1600 4WD Wagon – Snowpiercer, by Jim Brophy
These are long-extinct in the midwestern US, but I saw one at a local car show maybe 5 or 6 years ago. I never paid much attention to these when they were new, but that day it was one of my favorite things on display.
Those bumpers look pretty US to me, as does about everything else on the car. And I remember Japanese plastics used in interiors of the era that all turned different colors as they aged.
As a kid in the late 70’s and early 80’s I knew two couples who had joined the “Cult of Subaru”, both owning 2 or more of them back-to-back, and oddly all in that creamy yellow/beige color just a bit more vibrant than the one featured here. I remember thinking of them as odd little cars, and remember the distinct growl of their engines, so different from other 4 cylinder cars back then. Now my mother and her husband have been members of the same cult for the past 15 years, currently owning an Outback and a newly purchased Legacy sedan. Comparing their current outback to the featured wagon it’s almost hard to imagine them coming from the same planet. They’ve certainly come a long way, baby.
Unfortunately, they have a reputation of being the most easily-rusting of all the Japanese cars of that period. I seem to remember that they didn’t have an inner fender on the front, just the metal you saw from the outside, so if you didn’t get your car Ziebarted (or Rusty Jonesed) on Day 1, you were probably going to be replacing fenders by the end of Year Two.
I owned a 1979 DL (Leone) wagon for about three years in the mid-1980s. It was a FWD version with 5-speed and AC. The air conditioning handled Texas summers just fine. The car was slow as Christmas but the ride was fairly smooth for a small car probably because of the torsion bar suspension. It also got great mileage even around town but regular unleaded gasoline was only 87 cents a gallon at the time in my the state.
I was in grad school for part of the time I owned the car and delivering pizzas in the evening for some extra cash. I had no trouble racking up over 40,000 miles on the car in less than three years. It was really reliable. My only grief was having to replace the clutch at one point which necessitated removing the engine and transaxle from the car.
I sold the car to a fellow student who was from France in 1988. He wasn’t a “car guy” but said the Subaru reminded him of the cars he knew in his home country. I wonder which he had in mind.
Those are US spec bumpers. Given that the US was by far the primary market for the AWD wagon, there’s little doubt in my mind that this came from there.
These are also long extinct in the relatively rust free Pacific Northwest, and we’re Subaru Country up here. These used to be thick on the ground, but I can’t remember the last time I saw one. Even the 80s era models have vanished and they long existed as one of Washington’s “roaches of the road”.
Wow, that is in amazing condition! I still see the odd one around here on Vancouver Island but they are generally in beater condition.
Nice find! I don’t see the wagon or sedan versions very often (ok, practically never), but the BRAT version is relatively common if usually at end of life. Here’s one in the same color even…
Didn’t they have an amazing range? A coupe and a hardtop! And as for that Grand Am model, I wonder whether Pontiac knew?
Those BRATs (Brumbies in Australia) used to everywhere; there was one in my town, but I haven’t seen it since Covid.
Here’s the earlier GSR coupe, in blue like the one in the ad.
That’s quite a find and a useful piece of history to learn/re-learn.
Thanks Professor!
My Dad bought a new Subaru DL in 1976, back then most were FWD (they did have the AWD wagon but that was it).
The FWD was the draw…VW and Honda were expensive, Saab was in another class (a bit expensive for commuter only use) and my bad experience ruled out Fiat. He looked at a Datsun F10, but was scared of what looked like an engineering change, a vent on the hood near the carburator. He bought the Subaru in Winooski (should have mentioned we lived in Vermont, that’s why he wanted FWD…it was still not very common in ’76 though that changed completely over the next decade.
The Subaru had an automatic, a bow to my mother, who still hasn’t gotten comfortable with manual transmission despite learning to drive on a ’51 Chrysler Windsor with semi-automatic transmission. I think it had standard AM radio and defroster (they bragged about such equipment back then, lots of cars had no radio and defrosters weren’t required equipment for another decade or so). The hood buckled when it was about 2 years old when both the primary and secondary hood latches failed and it blew up in the wind, my Dad never replaced it, so from then on we had rubber shock cords between the front wheel wells to keep the hood closed. Ours was the really common light yellow color you don’t see any more but was pretty common back then.
Yes, the spare was still mounted on top of the boxer engine…think it was 13 incher. Not a fancy car but it got him back and forth to work daily.