What was the most affordable new four-wheel-drive automobile out there in america in the course of the early Nineteen Nineties? No, it wasn’t the Subaru Loyale sedan, nor was it the Ford Tempo/Mercury Topaz AWD. It was the Subaru Justy 4WD, a tiny three-cylinder machine out there right here for the 1988 via 1994 mannequin years. Right this moment’s Junkyard Gem is a kind of now-rare vehicles, present in a Northern California boneyard a number of months again.
The MSRP for the Justy 4WD GL two-door hatchback for 1993 was $9,478, or about $21,073 in 2023 {dollars}. This automobile is the four-door hatchback, so its record worth began at $9,913 (round $22,041 after inflation).
There was one new four-wheel-drive truck that was a bit cheaper than the Justy in 1993: the Suzuki Samurai 4WD, which price $8,599 ($19,119 now) that 12 months.
The Justy was sluggish, to place it mildly, with its fuel-injected 1.2-liter SOHC straight-three producing 66 horsepower and 73 pound-feet; some sources say that Suburu was nonetheless placing carburetors in U.S.-market Justys as late as 1993, however the earliest I’ve seen so geared up was a 1992 mannequin. This automobile simply barely managed to tip the scales at a ton (curb weight was 2,045 kilos for the four-door), so it was gentle sufficient to beat a 49-horsepower Geo Metro XFi in a drag race.
After all, the Justy was even slower with Subaru’s CVT bolted to its engine. This one has the bottom five-speed guide. The 4WD button on the shift knob was used to modify between front- and four-wheel-drive; go away the automobile in 4WD on dry pavement for too lengthy and also you’d put on out the tires and probably break drivetrain elements.
Earlier Justys had five-digit odometers, however this one has six digits and so we will see that it simply squeaked previous 200,000 miles throughout its life.
It is rusty for a California automobile, however its last parking spot is near the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains and so maybe it spent each winter buried in snow.
You will discover one in each automobile. You will see.
A Vary Rover that is extra in your vary.
The off-roading sequence on this industrial requires some suspension of disbelief.
Subaru shipped a right-hand-drive Justy to California so as to shoot this industrial.
A sedan model of the Justy was offered in Taiwan because the Subaru Tutto.