There are enduring stereotypes about certain automakers and the people who buy their products. Ferrari owners? Flashy, slightly greasy guys who wear sunglasses indoors. Tesla buyers? Silicon Valley tech insufferables.

And if you drive a Subaru, you're probably from New England or the Pacific Northwest.

It's an image that has hung with Subaru for decades—the practical car of choice for earthy, outdoorsy, environmentally-conscious types. College professors, say, or the type of rural folks who shun the notion of a pickup truck. The Japanese automaker has embraced its U.S. image with charitable contributions and feel-good involvement in the sorts of outreach that resonate with its presumed buyer. "Love: It's what makes a Subaru, a Subaru," you've no doubt heard repeated on your local NPR station.

How did Subaru become the unofficial car of Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Washington and Oregon? It all has to do with a shrewd—some might say cynical—marketing decision made all the way back in 1971.

1969 Subaru 360 Alden Jewell Flickr

Today, Subaru is associated with safe, fuel-efficient and family-friendly vehicles with all-weather capability. Its origins are much more humble. As our own Chris Perkins explained on the occasion of Subaru of America's 50th anniversary earlier in 2018, the automaker started out as an arm of Fuji Heavy Industries, building tiny city cars sold only in Japan in the late 1950s. These cheap microcars were perfectly suited to the Japanese market, as the nation rebuilt its cities and economy after the devastation of World War II.

Subaru

In the mid-1960s, businessmen Malcolm Bricklin and Harvey Lamm approached Fuji Heavy Industries about establishing a U.S. business importing these minuscule vehicles. By 1968, Subaru of America was born, bringing the Subaru 360 to our shores for the first time.

The 360 was woefully out of place on American roads. Next to the huge, powerful, gas-guzzling beasts of Detroit's muscle car heyday, the little Subaru's 360-cc two-stroke two-cylinder engine seemed better suited to lawn equipment. The 360 made a Volkswagen Beetle seem luxurious and refined. It was so insignificant, its roof was made of fiberglass rather than steel. The whole car weighed less than 1000 lbs—light enough to be exempt from our nation's rudimentary automotive safety regulations at the time.

Subaru of America seized on the 360's incongruous appearance on U.S. roads, advertising it as "cheap and ugly" and touting its small size and admirable fuel economy. It didn't work. With the VW Beetle costing just a few hundred dollars more but offering a much more substantial and popular vehicle, the 360 languished on the market.

Then, Consumer Reports tested the 360. The review was scathing. CR called the little Subaru "unacceptably hazardous," noting its glacial acceleration and unpredictable cornering. "Just driving straight down an open road could be unsettling," the report goes on. Sitting in the cramped car, CR wrote, "made most members of our staff psychologically as well as physically uncomfortable." The magazine gave the car the unenviable rating of Not Acceptable, calling it "the most unsafe car on the market."

"It's hard to imagine buying a used U.S. car for that price that wouldn't be a better value (and we can imagine some pretty hairy used-car deals)."

-Consumer Reports, reviewing the Subaru 360 in April 1969

With initial curiosity-driven demand dried up, and the Consumer Reports review echoing maliciously, U.S. Subaru sales ground to a halt.

In 1971, Subaru of America embarked on an ambitious plan to outrun the bad review. As co-founder Bricklin told Automotive News in a rollicking interview earlier this year, "Somebody called me and said, 'Have you seen Consumer Reports?' I said, 'What's Consumer Reports?' [...] At the time, they had a circulation of half a million. So I thought, so what? Half a million people saw it, out of how many million in the United States?"

So Subaru of America decided to focus on markets where Consumer Reports had less sway—as Automotive News puts it, "small towns where the reputation of the local dealer was more important than awareness of the brand he was selling." The American importer targeted rural regions far away from the big cities. Places like Vermont, Minnesota, Washington state, New Hampshire and western Pennsylvania—where hardworking people on a budget might be willing to try a relatively-unknown brand offering cheap, frugal transportation.

But it took more than a rural invasion to kick Subaru's U.S. sales into high gear. Two critical turning points, occurring in quick succession, sealed Subaru's success. First was the 1973 oil embargo, which led to a panic among American car buyers whose typical vehicle at the time only managed around 13 mpg. Suddenly, smaller, more fuel-efficient offerings from Europe and Japan seemed much more enticing. As Automotive News points out, Subaru's annual U.S. sales climbed from 22,980 in 1974 to 80,826 in 1977.

1976 Subaru DL wagon (right) and 1980 Subaru GL wagon Subaru

Even more influential was Subaru's decision to offer four-wheel drive beginning in 1974. At the time, four-wheel drive was a feature relegated to pickup trucks and rugged, unforgiving off-road vehicles. The Subaru DL and GL were some of the first conventional sedans and station wagons to offer four-wheel drive, in a sensibly-sized, fuel-efficient family car design.

In the suburban and rural markets where the automaker focused its attention, these Subarus were a godsend. This was long before automakers and their marketers dreamed up the concept of the SUV, the family-friendly four-wheel drive utility vehicle meant more for kid-hauling than forest-service or farm duty. In the era that predated the SUV, folks living in snowy, mountainous, or otherwise rugged regions used gas-guzzling truck behemoths to get around. Many of these vehicles required you to get out and manually engage the four-wheel drive system, crouching at the front wheels getting rained or snowed on.

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Subaru put a ton of effort into touting its four-wheel drive family cars. Here was an affordable car that promised all the inclement weather capability of a big truck with none of the imposing heft and punishing rough ride. The angular station wagon became the "official vehicle" of the U.S. Olympic Ski Team, putting Subaru squarely in the field of vision of outdoor athletes and adventurers. In 1980, Subaru sold more than 140,000 vehicles in the U.S.; that year, four-wheel drive became available on every vehicle in Subaru's lineup.

1996 Subaru Legacy "Outback," the first year for the high-riding, all-terrain Outback model. Subaru

Since 1980, Subaru has ridden out numerous ups and downs in the U.S. market, explained in depth in this Automotive News retrospective on the automaker's 50th anniversary in North America. But the brand kept its focus on the feature that made its offerings stand out in the market: All-weather capability in a practical family car, thanks to a four-wheel drive system that worked automatically, no shifting or tinkering required. Subaru's advertising in the 1990s included active-lifestyle folks—the backpackers, campers, mountain bikers and kayakers who appreciated Subaru's go-anywhere capability and environmentally-friendly fuel economy—as well as healthcare workers, emergency crews and field technicians whose jobs and duties didn't allow for snow days. Subaru changed its terminology from "four-wheel drive" (associated with big burly pickup trucks) to the friendlier-sounding "all-wheel drive," and starting in 1995, every Subaru model sold in the U.S. had the feature as standard equipment.

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Subaru worked hard to expand beyond its strongest markets—the snowy regions of the Northeast and Northwest—throughout the 1990s and 2000s. A famous ad campaign staring Paul Hogan of Crocodile Dundee highlighted Subaru as a rugged adventure-ready machine. Development and outreach in the sunbelt brought success in markets the brand formerly ignored. Starting in 2009, Subaru notched a nine-year streak of consecutive U.S. sales records, moving nearly 650,000 vehicles in 2017.

But the automaker hasn't forgotten the regions that made it what it is today. Mike Geylin, who did media work for Subaru in the 1990s and 2000s, told Automotive News that the automaker is jokingly referred to as the official state car of Vermont. Tom Doll, president of Subaru of North America and an employee of the automaker since 1982, recounts how he frequently meets customers who have kept the same Subaru for 10, 15, even 20 years.

"They become attached to it," Doll told Automotive News.

"The love affair with Subaru is very real," Geylin said in the same article. "It's a tight community."



It's a far cry from Subaru of America's early days, struggling to sell a chintzy vehicle rightly derided as underperforming and unsafe. And while some may call Subaru "the unofficial car of Vermont" with a hint of derision, the coastal snowbelt states played a huge role in allowing Subaru to become the eighth-largest-selling automotive brand in the U.S. in 2017. And it all came about trying to outrun a bad review.

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