Junkyard Find: 1982 Subaru BRAT
Ah, the Subaru BRAT. Just as you can’t find anyone who hates The Ramones, you can’t find anyone who wants to beat on the Subaru BRAT with a baseball bat. As perhaps the best-loved car that shows up in self-service wrecking yards with any regularity, the BRAT always inspires me to whip out my camera when I see a junked example. So far this series, we’ve admired this ’79, this ’79, this ’84, this ’82, and this Sawzall-ized ’86 crypto-BRAT.
Only 88,288 miles! I found this car in a well-stocked yard just north of Los Angeles, not too far from the ranch where Ronald Reagan drove his BRAT. Yes, Midwesterners, that means that you’re looking at a low-mile 32-year-old Japanese car without the slighest speck of rust on its body… and it’s going to be crushed, shredded, put in a container in Long Beach, and shipped to China to make Emgrand EC7s.
It has the “Twin-Halo” roof option.
A time-capsule early-80s Radio Shack cassette deck, complete with the coveted auto-stop feature!
How many BRATs were made with factory air conditioning?
You can see evidence of a camper shell on this one. Poor doomed 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, Hagerty and The Truth About Cars.
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The T-top hatches, aka“Halo Twin Roof” on these held up incredibly well. The seal was tight and they never leaked. If only the tops on GM F and G-Bodies were as well designed. Reagan drove one. I'm surprised the opposition research folks in other campaigns never called him out. You could imagine the ads "Gov Reagan drives a Japanese vehicle? Remember Pearl Harbor!" Though by the time he ran in 76 and 80 the antipathy toward buying a Japanese vehicles by the some of the WWII generation but mainly the post-war boomers had declined.
Fascinating reading here ~ I know bupkis about Audio Equipments but my Brother was a sound Engineer for many years and he gave me a really nice pair of ' Advent ' speakers that make my crappy old stereo sound great . -Nate