Re: '1991 Subaru SVX: This Is A Subaru?'

svx looks fine in my book. As for the juke it follows the subaru "the inner beauty" philosophy by being a sole car in it's class with an active rear diff ;-)

It looks OK to me as well, but I don't think I'd ever want to own one.

Believe me, it's just as ugly on the inside. ;-)

The Juke is sort-of an enlarged and uglier version of the old Nissan Micra / March ... but Nissan replaced it with a more normal and sensible car.

I should say that Nissan aren't the only ones producing ugly-as-sin car designs these days, it was just that those two were the first to spring to mind.

I put 100k miles on my '92 in three busy years -- zero problems, super performance (50 shot wet nitrous), and great comfort. As for looks, it got a lot of complements. It's hard to imagine why it's catching flak now.

It sold for about what I paid for it, and from what I understand it's still on the road with the original drive train at 300k miles or more.

A wonderful car!

I was referring to the drivetrain beauty. Or, lacking such (it's a front wheel driver anyway) the presence of the active diff in the rear axle. The inner furnishings of the cabin are not as much of an importance in my book. Spartan interiors are fine.

Well, it's good that nissan took the "we make the ugliest cars on the planet" crown from fhi. suits them well

What do expect from Renault??? Renault owns a large portion of Nissan, and there is a lot of Renault DNA in today's Nissans.

I'm not sure Nissan deserves the ugliest cars "crown" ... they're just the ones that spring most readily to my mind since Nissan was the sponsor for the company cars at my previous job. There are definitely other makes of ugly cars. :-)

I'm not sure the French make ugly cars ... but they certainly make some weird ones with some peculiar design decisions.

Which is how I would describe the Juke, the Leaf, and the Murano, for sure.

They sure are ugly cars, but not really "weird". The "concept" cars have often looked like these ugly designs, but now they seem to make it through to actually being manufactured.

As for the Leaf, many of the electric cars look ugly. There was an article in the local newspaper not long before Christmas which said the ugliness is one reason people aren't buying them as much as the makers thought they would.

The French cars tend to look OK-ish, but have weird oddities, for example, putting all the important dashboard instruments in the centre of the console between the driver and the passenger (which the new Mini has somewhat copied), adjustable suspension on a car that doesn't remotely need it (which the boy racers have copied), etc.

probably italians had beaten french at the "we make the ugliest" game.

The Multipla is indeeed ugly.

Businessweek.com has this list of 50 ugly cars, but some of them are not actually ugly.

Some of the ugliest cars ever made were actually American - those horrible "Yank Tanks" of the late 1950s - 1960s that were massively long and wide with ridiculous tail fins that got WAY out of hand.

But the ugliest cars ever are usually those custom-altered ones. The latest example is Justin Bieber's idiotically chrome-like finish - not only extremely ugly, but "great" for blinding other drivers on the road when the sun gleams off it. :-\

David

Of course, Subaru themselves have come up with some ugly designs ... roughly every alternate generation of the Impreza is ugly (I can't remember if it's the odd or even numbered generations).

Many of the jeep-style vehicles are ugly (especially the "home-made" ones). It's mostly because they're built for function rather than style, but some of them don't even work for the function either. There was an article in the car section local paper a couple of weeks ago about a rather New Zealand made version of the land rover called the Trekka (based on a Skoda Octavia!) from the late 1960s, many of which were rather ugly, but it was cheap and easy to get parts for.

lots of gray market subarus from the states roaming the streets around here. But I don't think 2.5 were sold in this market until recently. I do not think they are even sold in the impreza line now. With subarus priced at the audi prices around here guess how competitive they are? lest we not forget the parts prices are (unreasonably) high. So I don't spend any time studying the local market subarus. It made some sense when import tariffs were favorable to buy a used subaru from the north american market but it makes zero sense to buy a $45k (US) new forrester.

I'm am assuming that it had was a 3.0 overbore job. I never sait id didn;t work out as well. I think that engine was just fine in SVX. Definitely better than 2.5 abomination of the engine that FHI unearthed in response to cries for more displacement

Why would you say that the 2.5 is an abomination? I ran it here for 10 years+, with little problem. Although around the end it was running low on power.

Yousuf Khan

Cause it was spinning so unwillingly as if it had a boat anchor attached to the flywheel. And that was without the benefit of producing locomotive torque.