Junkyard Find: 1993 Subaru SVX

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

The Subaru SVX, as I explained in the text of the previous SVX Junkyard Find, is one of those cars with a real-world price tag far, far lower than Internet Car Experts would have you believe. So low, in fact, that it is not at all difficult to find Subaru’s amazing last-gasp-of-80s-silliness car in wrecking yards. Here’s a ’96 I found in Denver a few weeks back.

I think the XT has the more appealingly bewildering Moon Base Japan controls, but the big 3.3 liter boxer six beats the XT6’s engine.

This car is pretty clean for a junkyard resident, and it ought to be with just 117K on the clock.

Subarus have become more reliable since the heyday of 80s/90s design madness, but they’re lost a lot of character on the way.






Murilee Martin
Murilee Martin

Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.

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  • Haakman Haakman on Jun 24, 2012

    One of my all-time favorite magazine stories (from Car Stereo Review, March/April 1993 issue) described a trip in a new SVX from the US into Canade to see a Tragically Hip concert. My memory is fuzzy on it but I do recall a prominent feature of the story being something called the Very Necessary Speedometer test. It was amusing to my 14-year-old self anyway. Anybody have that old rag stashed away?

  • LOST Rogue 89 LOST Rogue 89 on Jul 31, 2015

    Where is this at I'm 17 and need parts for my svx

  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.
  • FormerFF We bought three new and one used car last year, so we won't be visiting any showrooms this year unless a meteor hits one of them. Sorry to hear that Mini has terminated the manual transmission, a Mini could be a fun car to drive with a stick.It appears that 2025 is going to see a significant decrease in the number of models that can be had with a stick. The used car we bought is a Mk 7 GTI with a six speed manual, and my younger daughter and I are enjoying it quite a lot. We'll be hanging on to it for many years.
  • Oberkanone Where is the value here? Magna is assembling the vehicles. The IP is not novel. Just buy the IP at bankruptcy stage for next to nothing.
  • Jalop1991 what, no Turbo trim?
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