Junkyard Find: 1987 Subaru XT GL
The Subaru XT is a car you won’t see often in most parts of the country, but Denver junkyards have tremendous quantities of old Subarus and so I see them on a regular basis here. So far, this series has had this ’85 XT Turbo, this ’91 XT, this ’91 XT6, and now today’s ’87 XT.
I shot a bit of video of the tilt wheel/instrument cluster in action. Since I have developed an unhealthy obsession with 1980s Japanese digital instrument clusters, I bought the one out of the ’85 XT Turbo. Today’s XT had the regular analog cluster, so I left it in the car.
If you like 1980s design, this car is full of good examples. I was in college in 1987, and I remember thinking very clearly at the time that nobody will ever be capable of feeling nostalgia for this era. Now that Tears For Fears plays in supermarkets and Members Only jackets are making a comeback, I have been proved wrong about that embarrassing decade once again.
Multi Point FI!
These cars were full of weird little touches like these door-latch cover panels. Sure, more stuff to go wrong (and with 1980s Subarus, much did go wrong), but it was still cool stuff.
This example is the ordinary front-wheel-drive version.
Someday I will be unable to resist the lure of the Alcyone, and I will buy a nice XT Turbo or XT6.
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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Back in the early 90′s there used to be one of these parked on my street. Base model, XT DL (Talk about your letter and trim level letters) no AWD in light blue, black bumpers with steelies and the center caps. It did not even have a rear seat, just a pressed board package shelf with a sticker warning you not to seat passengers there. Obviously no rear seat belts. Think an old 30′s, 40′s Business coupe.
My friend's wife had an XT, a '90, I think. It had the analog instrument panel, and was white. It was slow, it broke down an awful lot, and I was asked to help fix it, when it wasn't something the dealer had to deal with. As it aged, it just had more and more weird issues, a lot of them having to do with the brakes for some reason. One day, my friend took it to the dealer for dead A/C, and it never came back. He traded it for a Mitsubishi Eclipse, a base one, maroon metal flake. That car was great for 4 years, then it was stolen (First of 4 vehicles that were stolen while they lived in a not so great neighborhood) and totalled after the folks who stole it rolled it down into a ravine. He and his wife didn't even know it was gone until the police called to tell them it had been found. They had a second kid on the way, so they ended up buying an SUV, that was stolen and trashed too, in almost the same area.