Junkyard Find: 1995 Subaru SVX
Living in Colorado, I find lots of junked Subarus. Today’s Junkyard Find, however, is the first Subaru SVX I’ve seen at The Crusher’s doorstep.
The SVX is one of those cars whose Internet Car Expert Perceived Value (ICEPV) tends to be far, far higher than its Motivated Seller Trying To Get Rid Of This Heap Value (MSTTGROTHV). You can find other cars with very high ICEPV-to-MSTTGROTHV ratios (e.g., Porsche 944, Dodge Omni GLHS, any 1960s Detroit station wagon), but none inspires quite the passion that you see when you start talking about the SVX. For example, the Living Waters Church of Subaru SVX that competed (if that’s the word) in several 24 Hours of LeMons races a few years back. When the online car forums caught word that an SVX qualified for the LeMons $500 budget rule, the bulk of the fevered responses were variations on the “NO WAY can you get an SVX for that cheap!!1!” and “It’s gonna PWN everything else on the track!!1!!” themes. Well, of course you can buy a basket-case SVX for dirt cheap, for the same reason you can buy an ugly BMW L7 for cheap: once they’re less than perfect, the cost of fixing them up is too high. As for dominating the race, the Living Waters SVX ran a total of maybe 25 laps in three races, breaking some difficult-to-fix component every hour or so (and while it was running, the ill-handling Subaru got its doors blown off by Neons and Cavaliers).
Right. So, let’s not hear any anguished Internet Car Expert talk about this “$10,000 car” ending up in the junkyard. Nobody was willing to pay just-above-scrap-price for it at auction, and so now it’s going to get picked over by junkyard buzzards and then crushed like it’s a Ford Contour with fire damage.
Of course, a 24-valve EG33 Subaru engine isn’t going to last long in a self-service junkyard; someone grabbed the long block right away.
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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While all Subarus are interesting mechanically, I believe this was the absolute model that was visually interesting, in a good way. Since the SVX, everything they've done has been either dishwater dull in the looks department, or had a retina-searingly-ugly flying vagina on the front.
Like the Citroen SM, this is a car whose weird factor appeals to me but whose reality of ownership experience will likely always preclude me from actually purchasing. I mentioned to my Subaru mechanic that I'd thought about it, and he told me, "well, a lot of people put a WRX transmission in them, and that seems to work pretty well...but overall, it's a pain in the ass to work on, not to mention heavy. You'd be just as happy with a WRX." Which I think was his way of saying, "if you get one, I'll work on it, but I'll charge you a premium to do so". I did see a nice one recently in Beaverton, OR...out of commission on a flatbed truck.