Junkyard Find: 1982 Subaru BRAT

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

With so many old Subarus in Denver wrecking yards, I do run across the occasional BRAT. We’ve seen this ’79 and this very rare Sawzall Edition ’86 so far in this series, and today we’ll be looking at a well-used ’82 that still has the very rare lawsuit-inducing jumpseats in the back.

Yes, those Chicken Tax-skirting jumpseats that made the BRAT, legally speaking, a car instead of a truck were loose in the bed of this Subaru when I found it a couple weeks back.

I thought about buying the seats for my Dodge A100 van, but they’re missing the headrests and one of the grab handles, plus the floor-mounting brackets were beat to hell.

These cars rusted very quickly, though Colorado’s arid climate spared this one from full-on Michigan-grade cancer.

Nice BRATs are worth quite a bit these days. Thrashed ones are worth scrap value.

Strangely, I saw three vehicles with variations on this sticker during this trip to the junkyard. There’s meaning there somewhere.









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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  • April April on Feb 05, 2014

    I had two of this era Subie. A 76' GF hardtop and a 78 two-door coupe. 5-speeds. Both pale yellow with some nice red primer in places. They were fun. I miss them.

  • Big_gms Big_gms on Feb 06, 2014

    Never owned or driven one, but I've crossed paths with a couple Brats. When I was in kindergarten, my teacher had one. That was in 1979-80. The other one I crossed paths with was under very unpleasant circumstances: a car accident. I was turning onto a side road in my 1973 Chevy Caprice, when my car began to slide sideways on the snow. Next thing I know, bang! I was hit in the passenger side rear quarter panel and spun around. The vehicle that hit me was a Subaru Brat. My Caprice looked bad, but was still driveable; the Brat was totaled...that was in December 1990.

  • 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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