What was the most affordable latest four-wheel-drive automobile available in the USA throughout 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 available here for the 1988 through 1994 model years. Today’s Junkyard Gem is certainly one of those now-rare cars, present in a Northern California boneyard a couple of months back.
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 list price began at $9,913 (around $22,041 after inflation).
There was one latest four-wheel-drive truck that was a bit cheaper than the Justy in 1993: the Suzuki Samurai 4WD, which cost $8,599 ($19,119 now) that yr.
The Justy was slow, to place it mildly, with its fuel-injected 1.2-liter SOHC straight-three generating 66 horsepower and 73 pound-feet; some sources say that Suburu was still putting carburetors in U.S.-market Justys as late as 1993, however the earliest I’ve seen so equipped was a 1992 model. This automobile just barely managed to tip the scales at a ton (curb weight was 2,045 kilos for the four-door), so it was light enough to beat a 49-horsepower Geo Metro XFi in a drag race.
In fact, the Justy was even slower with Subaru’s CVT bolted to its engine. This one has the bottom five-speed manual. The 4WD button on the shift knob was used to modify between front- and four-wheel-drive; leave the automobile in 4WD on dry pavement for too long and also you’d wear out the tires and possibly break drivetrain parts.
Earlier Justys had five-digit odometers, but this one has six digits and so we are able to see that it just squeaked past 200,000 miles during its life.
It’s rusty for a California automobile, but its final parking spot is near the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains and so perhaps it spent every winter buried in snow.
You will find one in every automobile. You may see.
A Range Rover that is more in your range.
The off-roading sequence on this industrial requires some suspension of disbelief.
Subaru shipped a right-hand-drive Justy to California with the intention to shoot this industrial.
A sedan version of the Justy was sold in Taiwan as the Subaru Tutto.
This Article First Appeared At www.autoblog.com
