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.
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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