Vintage Subaru 360 Drive: Inauspicious Roots

The Subaru brand is on fire these days, with only two small annual sales decreases in the last 22 years and nine years of double-digit increases during that time. Strong products are earning these sales stats, as evidenced by Subie's three SUV of the Year wins since 2009. The brand's initial foray into the U.S. market was, erm, a bit less auspicious.

In the mid-1960s auto-mogul Malcom Bricklin had a notion to open a chain of gas stations that would also rent cheap motor scooters. During a visit to Japan's Fuji Heavy Industries to check out the Rabbit scooter it was then producing, he got a look at sister brand Subaru's microcar, the bubbly, cute little 360. Conceived at the urging of Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry as a "people's car," it reportedly topped 60 mpg and weighed in under 1,000 pounds. Bricklin recognized a golden opportunity in that feathery curb weight because it meant the 360 could be imported to the U.S. without meeting all those costly and fussy federal regulations. Soon he founded Subaru of America (shortly thereafter taking the company public), and by 1968 boatloads of 360s began washing ashore.

The thing about not having to meet safety standards is that sooner or later those killjoys atConsumer Reportsare bound to get all up in your nongrille about safety. The magazine whined about the rear-hinged doors flying open at speed if not fully latched, called out the car's leisurely 37-second 0-60 (a.k.a. top speed) acceleration, and crash-tested the hapless 993-pound waif into a 4,000-pound American car at 30 mph. The Yank tank's bumper penetrated the 360's passenger compartment. Ouch. Soon there were lots of lots overflowing with unsold 360 sedans and forward-control vans and pickups. At the end, cars that originally listed for $1,297 were being offered at six for $2,000, but by then Subaru's vastly more substantial front-engine, front-drive FF-1 Star was on sale, and Subaru's future brightened enough for Bricklin to sell his interest at a tidy profit.

But how horrible were those early 360s? To get some idea, we test drove three examples at the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, and poked around a couple more.

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You think a 2,900-pound Dodge Caravan or even a 2,350-pound VW "microbus" ranks as a "mini" van? We gotcher Mini Van right here. All 1,180 pounds of it, measuring 9 feet 9.9 inches long, 4 feet 3 inches wide, and 5 feet and change tall. The 360-based Sambar was Japan's first kei-class micro truck/van, launching in 1961. The "suicide" doors vastly simplify the task of folding an adult's body into the compact front seats, which reside directly above the front tires. The second-gen versions that came to the U.S. shared their rear-mounted 25-hp 356cc air-cooled I-2 engines with the smaller, lighter sedan. The warm engine fires readily, but my first several launch attempts stalled the engine. Apparently the launch technique is approximately the same as that of a quad-turbo V-12 Bugatti EB110 doing a quarter-mile run: Dial up 80 percent throttle, and feather the clutch in. What fun launching with four adults onboard must have been! Once you're underway, acceleration is quite leisurely, and although top speed for the blunt-nosed vans was listed at 55 mph, 40 sure sounds like the top of fourth gear to my ears. At least the tiny dogleg-first shifter snicks through the gears reasonably well given how far away the transmission is, and generous airflow enters the cabin via the big flapper vent on the nose. It's certainly no surprise many of these little wonders seldom ventured off of college campuses. The Sambar was produced by Fuji Heavy Industries through 2012 and is now produced by Daihatsu/Toyota.

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Behold the rarest of the regular production 360s to reach our shores: the pickup. Think of it as Honey I Shrunk the Corvair Rampside. At home in Japan, it boasted the roomiest cargo bed and the lowest cargo floor, but even with the option of higher pickup-box walls than are fitted to the Lane's example, American consumers saw no cargo-space superlatives when looking at this microtruck. I had a bit more trouble firing this one up and getting it to stay lit, but once running, a liberal dose of clutch slip got the little open-bed Sambar underway, bobbing across the Lane Museum's vast parking lot, faithfully transmitting every lip, dip, and contour of the worn asphalt to the seat. I swung it wide around the farthest apron and suddenly experienced what felt like fuel starvation. The little red nipper glided to a halt, never to restart during this drive event. Sad face. Later that same day I spent time in a 1963 Fiat Multipla, and it was stunning how much more solid and reliable that one felt compared to the Subarus. But of course, by 1963 Fiat had been practicing the art of vehicle manufacture for 64 years. Even by 1970, Subaru had only been doing so for 17. Practice makes perfect—or at least a heckuvalot better.

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After having been dubbed "the most unsafe car in America" byConsumer Reports, 360s became welded to showroom floors. In an effort to repurpose them, Bricklin contacted Bruce Meyers of Meyers Manx dune buggy fame and asked him to pen a racy fiberglass body that could be fitted to the rolling chassis of a 360. He then fitted a tubular steel "nerf bar" that formed a continuous bumper providing 360-degree protection around the 360's chassis. He envisioned this FasTrack as a little race car in which adults could pay for the privilege of wheel-to-wheel spec-series racing at a price of $1 per lap. Alas, at $1 per lap, the "adults" tended to treat the "race cars" like demo-derby or at least carnival Dodge 'Em cars. Most were pretty quickly destroyed. This one survived and was made street legal by its owner of 15 years. Its powertrain is largely unaltered (please disregard the tongue-in-cheek "Turbo" badge on the tail). The 360's speedometer is mounted low on the center console, virtually out of sight. The one-piece lift-off body weighs a fraction of what the steel bodies on the sedans, vans, and pickups do, reducing the curb weight by about half. That means this one launches normally and gathers "speed" much more easily. The soft suspension and perhaps spent front shocks result in major brake dive and decidedly unracy body roll in turns, all of which just heightens the illusion that this is just an amusement park car that jumped the steel rail and escaped Disney's Tomorrowland.

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Down in a remote corner of the Lane basement is this delightful little SambarCamino 360, Frankensteined together out of a shortened 360 pickup rear and sedan front, with a windshield and steering column that both fold down. Why? So that the Peanut could ride in the 30-inch-tall, 60-inch-wide luggage compartment of a Greyhound bus converted to serve RV duty for an owner who didn't want to tow his runabout vehicle.

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Austin, Texas-based Jet Industries was known primarily for converting conventional cars to electric power and marketing them under their own nomenclature. Total production is believed to have been in the hundreds. Their customers were primarily universities, utilities, and other entities looking to appear environmentally conscious. The Jet 600 ElectraVan was a converted Subaru 360 Sambar microvan. At least 100 were produced. The rear seat area holds 12 six-volt batteries, which centralized the weight low in the vehicle. Interestingly, this conversion retains the original four-speed transmission instead of driving the wheels directly through a reduction drive, as most EVs do today and did back in the day. Range was in the neighborhood of 30 to 50 miles.