If Subarus Grow Up to Be Pretty, Will They Still Be Attractive? By PHIL PATTON WHEN a new car makes its public debut, the automaker listens anxiously for positive feedback. But at the Detroit auto show last month, Subaru was eager for comments of any kind about the design of the B9 Tribeca, the company's new seven-seat sport-utility vehicle.
Trainers hired to coach the hostesses who worked at Subaru's display made this clear, saying that "if anyone says anything about the styling, good or bad, that's a good thing."
Subaru has long been a wallflower at the prom of auto fashion. But styling is just about the only virtue for which Subarus have not been lauded. In surveys, consumers praise their durability and economy; enthusiast magazines applaud their ruggedness and sportiness.
The cars have not been ugly, just forgettable. The Tribeca, which goes on sale this summer, is Subaru's attempt to fix that.
As the company's first production model to carry its new, more expressive design theme, the Tribeca wears a face whose grille suggests a jet-engine intake flanked by wings, shapes intended to evoke the aviation origins of Subaru and its parent, Fuji Heavy Industries. The pronounced bulges around the Tribeca's wheel openings emphasize the presence of all-wheel drive, which has become the company's hallmark feature in the United States; a high beltline (the line under the side windows) also departs from the design of current Subarus.
The new design language was developed by Andreas Zapatinas, Subaru's head of advanced design, who was hired in 2002 to bring grace and uniformity to the model line as part of the company's effort to establish itself as a more upscale brand. His influence was embodied in two stunning, if not shocking, show cars: the B9SC roadster, unveiled at the 2003 Tokyo auto show, and the four-door B11S, which made its debut in Geneva the same year. A small city car also shown in Japan, the R1e, will make its debut in production form next month in Geneva.
The new look, Mr. Zapatinas said in an interview in Detroit, is intended to express the power of four-wheel drive and the qualities of precision engineering. The goal, he said, is to revise the image people have of Subaru.
"We have high quality and lots of attention to detail," Mr. Zapatinas said. "Before, maybe the exteriors did not say that.
"We have slowly managed to build a treasure here, to build a castle. It is time to consolidate and to give our family also a visual identity."
A playful and energetic man, Mr. Zapatinas slightly resembles the cartoonist R. Crumb. Engineering and design combine for Mr. Zapatinas in one of his favorite cars of all time, the Citroën DS, the pride of 1950's Gallic technology.
Mr. Zapatinas, born in Athens in 1957, studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. He worked for Chris Bangle at Fiat, later following Mr. Bangle to BMW. His work on the Fiat Barchetta and Alfa Romeo 145 has been widely praised.
Subaru's design has often seemed an afterthought, a container in which technology is wrapped, secondary to engineering. Subaru executives have in the past referred to their designs simply as "packaging." The ungraceful placement of beltlines, the cartoonish swells of the fenders and the muttlike faces seem not only to express a lack of interest in the romance of styling, but to advertise an outright disdain for it.
There is another side to Subaru, though. A raging rally-car personality is embodied in its signature blue sports models, notably the Impreza WRX STi that draws at least as much attention from teenagers as a Corvette or a Porsche. A six-cylinder sports coupe, the SVX, was built in the 1990's, but the upscale model baffled traditional Subaru buyers as much as the partitioned windows of its Giorgetto Giugiaro design baffled turnpike toll-takers.
The Tribeca, which will be Subaru's most expensive model, has attracted a lot of attention in Japan, Mr. Zapatinas said. But the potential for confusion over the name seems great. Some prospective buyers may think that a Tribeca is a geometric figure with the same unusual shape as the grille. For others, the name may suggest a Subaru that can cope with rough roads - urban as well as rural - even if those buyers do not know that TriBeCa is a neighborhood in Manhattan, the triangle below Canal Street, where cobblestone streets are best traversed with a rugged vehicle.
Some Japanese companies have made an effort recently to make their designs more, well, Japanese. Toyota designers talk about increasing the "J-factor." Nissan has incorporated elements of Japanese tradition into its designs, while Mazda expresses its zoom-zoom message with a look of samurai armor.
Does Mr. Zapatinas want his cars to look more Japanese?
"That should come out, not in a presumptuous way, but as an expression of Japanese premium engineering," he said.
"We want to show the same attention to detail you see in the display of vegetables at the market in Japan and even in the way the clerk gives you change at the checkout."
For the most part, Subaru drivers seem never to have missed fancy styling in their cars. The company succeeded in establishing itself as the leader in all-wheel drive before most other makers caught on to the interest in this feature. It jacked up an all-wheel-drive station wagon and called the result "the world's first sport utility wagon," finding a large pool of customers who wanted all-weather capability without an S.U.V.'s boxy body.
For many Subaru buyers, homeliness is not only acceptable but serves as a visible token of their refusal to be seduced by the superficialities of styling.
"I can't imagine anyone who cares less about the aesthetics of his car than I do," said David Laskin, the owner of a 2001 Subaru Outback. Mr. Laskin, who lives in Seattle, is a writer specializing in weather. He has driven his Outback many miles promoting his book, "The Children's Blizzard," about a deadly snowstorm that struck the Great Plains in 1888.
"It's an L. L. Bean edition, although we didn't buy it for that," Mr. Laskin said. He compares it to an L. L. Bean boot, waterproof and warm, even if it is not as fashionable as a Florsheim or Bruno Magli loafer.
"It's like a fleece vest instead of a cashmere sweater," Mr. Laskin said. "Out here in Seattle there's a whole lot of the 'earth muffin' thing about Subarus."
This counterchic suggests a perverse pride in the homeliness of the vehicles. A Subaru's look may say as much about its driver as the rakish shape of a Porsche
911 does, but in a wholly different way. It fairly screams anti-consumption. "We are not the sort of people to be deluded by such things," the sheet metal seems to say.With such customers, Mr. Zapatinas's design direction holds risks. The Tribeca shows a daring amount of grace. The taillights recall the lovely Alfas that Mr. Zapatinas worked on in the late 1990's. There is a hint of Porsche Cayenne in the face, and the shape of the grille is echoed in an interior more elegant and flowing than those of earlier Subarus.
Could a new generation of Subarus become, well, too pretty? "Only if it becomes too trendy, too fashionlike," he said, and he promises not to let that happen.
To judge from the reaction to the Tribeca, Subaru is safe from the dangers of prettiness for a while yet. "Too pretty? No way!" said Mr. Laskin, the Seattle Subaru owner. "It's just as chunky and drab and unassuming as always."