Junkyard Find: 1984 Subaru BRAT
The Subaru BRAT, basically a factory El Camino-ized Leone, has quite the lawsuit history in this country, due to the Chicken Tax-evading-but-dangerous jump seats in the bed that made the BRAT a “car,” legally speaking. The BRAT was sold in the United States until the 1987 model year, but it’s nearly impossible to find examples built after the early 1980s. Here’s a reasonably nice-looking ’84 that Shawn Rodgers (you may recognize him as the hero of the Junkyard Build Quality Challenges, as well as the captain of the very fast Bunny With a Pancake On Its Head 24 Hours of LeMons Rabbit team) saw in a San Francisco Bay Area wrecking yard last week and was kind enough to photograph for us.
I shoot junkyard BRATs whenever I see them, and so far in this series we’ve seen this ’79, this ’82 (which still had its jump seats), and this Sawzall-converted ’86 (I’m a sucker for cruelly hacked-up Subarus).
73 horsepower, which would be considered absolutely unacceptable in any vehicle attempting to be even vaguely truck-like today.
Nice nearly-a-T-top double sunroof— called a “Halo Twin Roof”— on this one.
Just the lo-fi solution for listening to bad mid-80s AM hits!
In Australia, the BRAT was called the Brumby and it was marketed with ads featuring pig passengers.
In the United States, Ruth Gordon pitched the BRAT.
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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Saw an old rerun of "Top Gear" that went on and on about how Subarus are a cliche vehicle for tweedy country gentlemen. It just seemed so bizarre, since that was in no way, shape or form the U.S. image of a Subaru buyer. The show explained that in the early days of importation into the UK, the dealer network was so weak, that they sold their vehicles through farm implement outlets. The aforesaid tweedy country gentleman would buy one for the first hand's (or whatever they call them in Britain) use and that after seeing how well they performed, the tweedy country gentleman would take over the car.
i know this is an older post but i am curious what the name of this yard was!? im looking for brat parts for a restoration. any help would be awesome!!