The Brightest Star

Some say the nineties were Subaru's heyday, and it is hard to argue. It was dominating world rallying. The Outback had arrived and was conquering the sales charts. The company had changed its entire image (how and why is a story we told in Girls Know Best), and the name would eventually follow, when Fuji Heavy Industries finally renamed itself Subaru Corporation in 2017. It was putting out great products, people were talking about it, it was growing, and it started to experiment.

Enter the SVX.

Except the SVX did not enter at the end of that story. It walked in at the very beginning, before any of it had happened. Subaru commissioned Giorgetto Giugiaro's Ital Design to sketch a luxury coupe in 1985, showed the result at the Tokyo Motor Show in October 1989, and put it on sale in America in July 1991 as a 1992 model. That was 2 years before Colin McRae gave Subaru its first World Rally Championship win, in New Zealand in August 1993; nearly 3 years before the Outback was unveiled in New York; and 4 years before the first of 3 straight manufacturers' titles.

The confident Subaru of the Outback and the blue-and-gold Impreza did not build the SVX. The Subaru that built the SVX had just posted a loss of more than $500 million in 1990 (about $1.3 billion in 2026), had watched its American sales fall from 183,242 cars in 1986 to 108,547 in 1990, had just bought out its own struggling US importer, and counted Nissan among its shareholders. Car and Driver's first road test noted that Subaru had nearly been swallowed by Nissan, and that the "smart money" said the adventurous stuff was over.

The smart money was wrong about the adventurous stuff. It was right about almost everything else. The SVX was not the victory lap. It was the last thing Japan's bubble economy paid for and the first thing the hangover had to sell, and that explains a great deal of what follows. It excuses almost none of it.

The Neighborhood

The SVX arrived when sport coupes were not just growing in presence but had already established themselves as fun, practical, fast and respected, cars with real standing in sports-car culture. You had the mighty Honda Prelude. You had the show-stopping Mitsubishi Eclipse, whose next generation would open a multibillion-dollar film franchise when a green one rolled into The Fast and the Furious in 2001. You had the Ford Probe GT, the car Ford originally meant to replace the Mustang with until Mustang loyalists revolted, and which went on to beat the Prelude, the Eclipse, the Corrado and its own twin in a Car and Driver comparison test (its love letter is A Golden Relic). You had the icon, the Acura Integra GS-R. You had the grand-touring Mazda MX-6, the Probe's sibling under the skin, and the Toyota Celica, which in All-Trac Turbo form had already done turbocharged all-wheel drive.

And there were more. The Volkswagen Corrado SLC with its narrow-angle VR6. The Nissan 240SX. The Toyota MR2 Turbo. The Diamond-Star triplets, the Eclipse, the Eagle Talon and the Plymouth Laser, of which the Eclipse GSX brought turbocharged all-wheel drive to the showroom for $19,029 (about $45,300 in 2026).

Above those you had the older and wiser siblings: the Nissan 300ZX Twin Turbo, the Mazda RX-7, the Toyota Supra Turbo, the Mitsubishi 3000GT VR-4 (The Overachiever), and on a floor of its own, the Acura NSX. Off to one side, in a nicer suit, sat the Lexus SC 400. As it turned out, the SC was the car the SVX really had to beat.

The SVX was positioned right in between on price, so naturally you would think it was a great bargain: big-coupe comfort, all-wheel drive and a flat-6 for less than the big boys wanted. It was not positioned in between on performance, and we will get to that. It failed, and not quietly, for a number of reasons, and Subaru supplied almost every one of them itself.

First, the Gem

Let's start with the compliment, because the SVX has earned a big one.

What came back from Ital Design looked like nothing Subaru had ever sold, and the 1989 show car made it to production almost untouched. It traded the hard creases of the XT coupe it replaced for a long, soft wedge. It cut through the air with a drag coefficient of 0.29, and European cars, with a larger undertray, got that down to 0.285. The glass ran from the doors up into the roof in one continuous sweep, the look Subaru sold as an aircraft-inspired canopy.

Underneath, almost nothing came from an older Subaru. The engine was a new 3.3-liter flat-6, the EG33, with 4 valves per cylinder, a variable-length intake and an engine computer that treated each bank of 3 cylinders as its own engine, so it could briefly shut one bank down to smooth an upshift. It made 230 hp, and it would stay the biggest engine Subaru put in a passenger car until the 3.6-liter Tribeca of 2008. All-wheel drive was standard, managed by a computer that moved torque between the axles as the grip came and went. Japanese customers could order 4-wheel steering. Japan and Europe also got a rear-biased center differential that America never did.

Then there were the small, delightful, deeply Subaru touches. Windshield wipers that sped up on their own as the car went faster. A switch under the dash to park those wipers higher in winter, so they would not freeze into the snow at the base of the glass. Speed-sensitive steering Car and Driver called "a model of response and accuracy." A molded plastic fuel tank that held 18.5 gallons (70 liters) and weighed 11 kg (24 lb).

Even the name was lovely. Subaru is the Japanese name for the Pleiades, the cluster of stars on the badge, and at home the car was the Alcyone SVX. Alcyone is the brightest star in the Pleiades. Subaru named this car after the brightest star in its own logo. No pressure.

That is the gem. Now for what Subaru did next.

Half a Window

The style, in my opinion, is great, and it has aged better than almost anything else in this story. It was the side windows that were weird.

Here is how it happened. Giugiaro drew those canopies curving from the door up into the roof, and the doors that were meant to swallow them were long but shallow. Glass curved that far could not drop into a door that short. Subaru's answer was to cut a smaller window into the big one: roughly 2/3 of the pane goes down, the top slice stays put, and the seam between them follows the curve of the door frame.

You had a massive window, which is great for seeing everything. But then you had a permanent frame and rubber seal sitting right next to your eyes. Put the window down on a warm evening and the top part stays exactly where it was, like someone constantly tormenting you: a window that has agreed to open, just not all the way. You want your elbow out. The SVX would like to discuss it. Lean on the sill and the fixed strip sits at the height of your temple. Reach out to a parking-garage ticket machine and you are posting a letter through a slot.

Car and Driver, which loved the car, said in its first test that the inset windows worked well and did not block the view, then admitted they "quickly grow as tiresome as an old joke." When the magazine came back to the SVX 35 years later, it called the windows "the inflamed forehead zit that drew everyone's eyes," and reported that onlookers kept calling it a Batmobile.

To be fair, and this whole piece is about being fair immediately after being mean, the windows had their moments. As Car and Driver pointed out, you could crack the small pane in the rain and stay dry. Motor Trend drove one past 100 mph with the windows down to see what would happen and found little buffeting. And because the big fixed pane never had to move, it could curve up into the roof exactly as Giugiaro wanted. Steve Thompson of Car and Driver called the result "a bright and joyful workplace."

So you had the most beautiful greenhouse in the class and a window that opened 2/3 of the way. What were you thinking?

One Pedal Short

Then you had a single transmission, a 4-speed automatic, in a world where the stick was wanted. That is not a figure of speech. When Motor Trend lined up 19 performance cars for its Bang for the Buck test in September 1992 (Eclipse, Talon, Laser, Probe, Integra, MX-6, Corrado, Mustang, RX-7, 300ZX, 3000GT, Stealth and the rest), the SVX was the only automatic in the field.

Car and Driver printed the 2 reasons in 1991. Subaru did not have a manual gearbox that could take the engine. And its chief of vehicle test and development, Shigeru Iga, believed, as the magazine put it, that "the car should do the work, not the driver."

To be fair to the gearbox, it was clever. It was a strengthened Legacy automatic with a bigger torque converter and heavier-duty clutches, and its computer watched engine speed, the speed of each axle, fluid temperature and the anti-lock brakes, and read how hard you were driving from the throttle. It chose the gear and it chose the torque split, and Car and Driver decided after some hard driving that it "may be smarter than the driver."

It was also the part most likely to break. Early transmissions earned a reputation for failing, and the gearbox was revised more than once in the car's first few years. Hagerty's British arm says the automatics seldom reached 100,000 miles without a rebuild, and Sports Car Market priced that rebuild at $1,800 to $4,200 in 2002 (about $3,300 to $7,800 in 2026). So the one transmission you were allowed was the one you were most likely to replace. Some owners have since swapped in manual gearboxes, which tells you what they wanted all along.

Here is the uncomfortable part. The Lexus SC 400 was automatic-only too, and it sold. It won Motor Trend's Import Car of the Year for 1992, and the SVX was one of the contenders it beat. So the gearbox alone did not kill the SVX. An automatic-only luxury coupe with a V8 and a Lexus badge worked fine. An automatic-only luxury coupe sold at the same dealership as the Justy and the Loyale did not.

A Hippo in a Feline Race

Then comes the weight. The SVX weighed 1,639 kg (3,614 lb) as Car and Driver tested it. A hippo in a feline race. It was smooth and unbothered in a straight line and completely happy at 80 mph, but once a proper corner came along, even with all-wheel drive, the nose wanted to keep going straight, just like a hippo.

Here I have to be honest, because the test equipment was kinder to the hippo than I am. Car and Driver measured 0.86 g on the skidpad and found "only moderate understeer at the limits." In Motor Trend's 19-car test it pulled 0.90 g, which tied the 300-hp Dodge Stealth R/T Turbo and beat the Eclipse, Talon and Laser. Its 114-ft stop from 60 mph was second best in the whole field. Autocar called the handling viceless.

The hippo, it turns out, could corner. What the numbers can't show you is how it felt doing it. With 59 percent of its weight on the front wheels (the figure published for the Australian car), it went wide nose-first when it finally let go, which is Autocar's "progressive understeer" and exactly the hippo I remember. It could take the corner. It never made you want to take another one.

Where it truly lost was the part nobody could argue with: getting going. Its 7.6 seconds to 60 mph was slower than the Probe GT, the MX-6, both Preludes, the Integra GS-R, the Corrado and the Eclipse GSX, every one of which cost thousands less. Only the Celica GT-S and the 240SX were slower. The older siblings, meanwhile, were 2 seconds or more up the road. That is the SVX's problem in one picture: priced with the big brothers, outrun by the little ones.

A hippo in a feline race.

Against the older siblings, the stopwatch is brutal and the brakes are not. Motor Trend measured the SVX in 1992, and it measured the 3000GT VR-4, the Supra Turbo and the NSX-T in the 7-car test we charted in The Overachiever, in 1997, by which time all 3 had grown faster. They reached 60 mph 2.2 to 2.5 seconds sooner and pulled 0.94 to 0.95 g against the SVX's 0.90. But from 60 mph the Subaru stopped in 114 ft, shorter than all 3 of them. The gap was just as real in 1991 form, when AutoWeek got a VR-4 to 60 mph in 5.1 seconds and an NSX in 5.3.

The SVX was heavy, but in fairness it was not the heaviest. The 3000GT VR-4 weighed 1,695 kg (3,737 lb), 56 kg (123 lb) more, and we love that one anyway. The difference is what each car had to carry its weight with. The Mitsubishi brought 320 hp and a 6-speed manual. The Subaru brought 230 hp and 4 speeds it chose for you.

The car was suited to be a grand tourer. It was very well appointed, with leather here and luxury there, and it drove well. Just not well enough.

The Sticker

The price was its biggest fall. When Car and Driver first tested the SVX, in its September 1991 issue, it expected a base price of about $25,000 (about $61,300 in 2026) and called that a fair value. By the time the cars reached showrooms, the LS listed at $26,250 (about $62,500 in 2026) and the leather-lined LS-L at $29,250 (about $69,600 in 2026), $8,000 to $11,000 more than any Subaru had ever cost (about $19,000 to $26,000 today).

That put it exactly where it could not win. A loaded LS-L cost $500 (about $1,200 today) more than a Toyota Supra Turbo, so close to the older siblings that people simply bought those instead. And the people who wanted one but could not afford it were more than happy with a Prelude, an Integra or an Eclipse, which cost $6,700 to $11,300 less (about $15,900 to $27,000 today) and beat it to 60 mph.

Then it kept going up. By 1997 the LSi listed at $36,245 (about $75,400 in 2026), and even the cheapest SVX on the lot, at $30,625 (about $63,700 in 2026), wore a bigger sticker than the most expensive one of 1992. Most of that was the yen. The SVX was built only in Japan, and a dollar that bought ¥134.59 in 1991 bought only ¥79.75 at its low point in April 1995, so every car Subaru shipped took more dollars to sell. The yen lifted every rival's price too, so the gap never closed.

Subaru's answer was the most "what were you thinking" moment of the car's life. For 1994 it built a front-wheel-drive SVX, the L, at $23,900 (about $53,900 in 2026). A front-wheel-drive Subaru flagship, from the company whose entire identity was all-wheel drive. The 1995 front-drive L is so rare that some SVX specialists doubt any were ever built.

Nobody Came

Subaru hoped to sell 10,000 a year in America. The best year was 1993, with 3,859. Over 7 calendar years, from July 1991 to the last cars in 1997, Americans bought 14,257 SVXs, which is less than a year and a half of the original plan.

The rest of the world did not rescue it. Of 24,379 sold worldwide, 5,884 stayed in Japan, where the SVX was the first Subaru too big for the government's compact-car dimensions and its 3.3 liters put owners into a steeper annual road-tax bracket. Europe took 2,478. Switzerland, sensibly, took the most, 951, more than Germany's 854. Australia took 249.

It was just not sure what it was, and it could never figure it out.

The Case for the Defense

Now let me lift it back up, because the people who drove the SVX for a living mostly loved it.

Car and Driver's Steve Thompson was 10 minutes into his first drive when he announced, "And we have a winner." The magazine then ran one for 30,000 miles, and it stayed rattle-free the entire time, including an ice-traction test in which it went backward at 60 mph. At 80 mph the flat-6 loafed along at 2,700 rpm, and editors booked it days ahead for vacation drives. John Phillips picked it up in New Jersey after lunch and ended up in Ann Arbor. "I didn't mean to," he wrote. "It just happened."

They could not even agree on how quick it was. Depending on whose stopwatch you trust, the SVX reached 60 mph in anything from 7.3 to 8.7 seconds.

In Japan, Subaru's television ads ran to the song "500 Miles," because the SVX could cover 805 km (500 miles) on one 70-liter tank. That is a grand tourer's boast, not a sports car's. Subaru even showed a shooting-brake version, the Amadeus, in 2-door and 4-door forms in 1991 and 1992, and seriously considered building it.

And the only competition the SVX ever won makes the point better than any road test. In the winter of 1991, before the car was even on sale in America, Ken Knight and Bob Dart took a mostly stock SVX from Seattle to the Arctic Circle and back and won the Alcan Winter Rally. The Alcan is not a flat-out stage rally. It is scored on regularity sections, where the prize goes to whoever holds the most precise pace over hundreds of miles of frozen road, and its organizers describe it as rallying in the original sense of a grand tour. The SVX won the one event on earth built for exactly what it was.

It was just not sure what it was, and it could never figure it out. Or, to be more precise: the car knew exactly what it was. It was a big, quiet, all-weather grand tourer that could cross a state before dinner. Subaru was the one who wasn't sure, so it priced it like a Lexus, sold it next to the Justy and wrapped it in a sports car's shape without giving it a sports car's gearbox.

The White Linen Suit

But honestly, they really do look great. The design, the shape, the aggressiveness, and above all the boldness of a company that had spent its whole life being sensible and then, just once, steered hard the other way. 35 years on, park an SVX beside anything from its showroom and it is still the one people walk over to look at.

I have always loved this car, and I have always wanted one. The trouble is that owning an SVX would be like wearing a white linen suit to a barbecue. Everyone tells you how good you look. Everyone wants a picture. Then the ribs come off the grill, and they all dig in, get messy and have the best afternoon of their lives, while you stand at the edge of the yard in the nicest outfit there, being careful. The Prelude owners are eating ribs. The Eclipse owners are eating ribs. You are checking your cuffs.

The more I thought about it, the less I wanted one. And still, to this day, when I see one, which is never, it is really cool.

The good news is that the suit costs almost nothing now. Hagerty's valuation tool puts a 1992 LS at $7,300, and recent auctions have run from $6,100 for a 109,000-mile car to $14,100 for an 85,000-km car this September. That is roughly 9 to 20 percent of what a loaded one cost new, in today's money. The catch has not changed: that automatic is still that automatic, and the parts are getting rare.

The SVX was a gem Subaru kept setting in the wrong ring. The wrong window. The wrong gearbox. The wrong showroom. The wrong price, and then a higher one. What were you thinking?

The Life of a Star

And yet it lived exactly the way its name said it would. The SVX had the life of a star. It formed in a cloud of bubble-era money and ambition, far from anywhere Subaru had been before. It arrived like a supernova, the brightest thing the company had ever built, and for its first 2 years everybody stopped to look. Then it cooled and shrank into a dwarf, down to 640 cars in its final year. And then it was gone, collapsed into a black hole: something you no longer see so much as find, to be studied and observed from a distance.

Which turns out to be the best part. Black holes are the most interesting things in the sky, because everything that ever fell into one is still in there, hidden, like the pearl inside the oyster. Subaru named this car after the brightest star in the cluster, and 35 years later it is still the one you look at first.