It’s ‘What To Drive’ if you can’t stand driving

There’s a saying in vintage car collecting: “You can’t pay too much — you can only buy too soon.” Similarly, Subaru’s early-’90s decision to engage avant-garde advertisers Wieden & Kennedy, architects of the “Bo knows” and other famed Nike campaigns, wasn’t the Category 5 disaster it appeared to be at the time. It was just a little early. The Portland, Oregon, agency didn’t know anything about cars, didn’t want to know anything about cars, and had no idea how to connect with the class-and-cost-conscious New Englanders who had been the iceberg bulk of Subaru’s customer base up to that point. At the time, this was looked at as a problem to be overcome. Nobody in the room was smart, or forward-thinking enough, to see it as a virtue.

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Subaru had long been defined by a simple but hugely limiting slogan: “Inexpensive, and built to stay that way.” In Japan, their humble sedans were popular with farmers and other rural folks who appreciated their rudimentary “part-time” four-wheel-drive system, but they weren’t socially equal to the more sophisticated machinery from Toyota, Honda, and Nissan. Stateside, they were fringe choices given an unexpected boost by, of all people, Ronald Reagan; his Voluntary Restraint Agreement that limited Japanese imports into the country meant that people often bought Subarus because their Honda dealer had nothing in stock.

Wieden & Kennedy’s approach to selling Subarus was as ignorant as it was whimsical, centered on the slogan “What To Drive.” “Subaru is ‘What To Drive,’” a Wieden executive explained, “because it comes at the right price with all the stuff on it, as opposed to being the car of the iconoclast, which is what it’s always been — a funky, goofy car that you gotta be left of Gene McCarthy and living in a tree to own.” The agency was tasked with building customer interest in two vehicles that seemed almost sales-proof: the new Legacy sedan that was larger, more expensive, and far more conventional than the firm’s existing offerings, and the outrageous SVX sports car that looked like a spaceship and could only roll down a small portion of the side windows, like the equally ill-fated DeLorean.

Randall Rothenberg’s book Where The Suckers Moon is a delightful distillation of the Subaru/Wieden & Kennedy relationship, from inauspicious beginnings to whimpering end. It was published in 1995, a time when many auto-industry experts were openly questioning Subaru’s ability to stay in the North American market. Nobody could have predicted that 1995 was also the year to put the firm on the path to its current success, one that would see annual sales increase from just 99,768 in 1995 to 700,117 in 2019. It started with one word: Outback.

By 1994, everybody knew that SUVs were the next big thing. They could be based on an existing pickup truck, such as the Ford Explorer, or clean-sheet unit-body designs, such as the Jeep Grand Cherokee. Subaru, however, had neither a pickup truck in the fleet nor the kind of cash needed to build an all-new vehicle. Out of pure desperation, Subaru of America kludged-up a fake SUV, using the unpopular Legacy wagon as a base. It had bigger wheels, a roof rack, and two-tone paint to make it look taller. The “Outback” was released in the 1995 model year, and the response was positive enough for the company to invest in a few more changes for 1996.

This more committed Outback got a raised suspension, a larger optional engine, a safari-style roof with extra headroom in back, and some very unsophisticated advertising featuring “Crocodile Dundee” star Paul Hogan. It was a massive hit. Before long, the vast majority of Subaru sales were Outback wagons. A smaller “Outback Sport” was extruded from the unpopular Impreza compact, lifting the fortunes of that model slightly, but most of Subaru’s new customers wanted the same standard-size Outback their neighbors had.

The brilliance of the Outback was this: the Legacy sedan on which it was based was a real slug compared to Honda’s sleek Accord or Toyota’s luxurious Camry, but once you put a raised suspension and off-road tires on the thing, its competitive set shifted to the Ford Explorer and Chevy Blazer — and compared to them, the Outback had the moves of a Ferrari. The poor fuel mileage of Subaru’s “boxer” four-cylinder was an embarrassment, unless you were comparing it to the outrageously thirsty V-6 and V-8 engines from Ford and Jeep. The Outback was easier to park than normal SUVs and had more space inside. It was even safer in a crash.

By the time the third-generation Outback arrived in America for the 2005 model year, Subaru had become a company that sold just two cars of any note in this country: the Outback line, and the sporty, but much less popular, WRX sedan. Sales had tripled since the low years of 1994 and 1995, and in a way that Bush/Cheney strategist Karl Rove, also thriving at the time, would have appreciated. Subaru had abandoned the Wieden & Kennedy strategy of going mainstream. Instead, it was simply playing to its base, and harder than ever before.

The Outback was the anti-SUV, and as sport utility vehicles became bigger and more extravagant, the difference between them and the humble Subaru wagon became even easier to discern. Owning an Outback had a distinct political overtone. It let people know that you had contempt for the truckish SUVs that filled the country’s bestseller list, but more importantly, you had contempt for the people who drove them. Subaru marketing doubled down on the fringe characters in American life: mountain climbers, militant lesbians, couples who preferred dogs to children.

Best of all, this doubling-down did nothing to harm Subaru’s existing relationships with the New England and Colorado ski set. The Outback was the only $25,000 car that had any traction with people who earned more than six figures, so Subaru raised the price, added features, expanded the model lineup, and kept giving people a reason to spend more of their seemingly unlimited wealth on a car that, strictly speaking, was little more than a cut-rate Camry wagon on stilts.

On a recent visit to Jackson Hole, your author was astounded to see that the Subaru Outback wasn’t just the most popular vehicle on the road; in some situations, it accounted for an actual majority of the cars in the parking lot. The early Outbacks now have the sort of careless cachet once reserved for ratty ’70s BMWs parked with their windows down on Malibu beaches. Their maintenance needs are breathtaking; one mechanic told me of $5,000 front-end jobs commissioned on an annual basis by wealthy families who didn’t care about the money and also didn’t want the nouveau implications of being seen in a new Outback.

Subaru’s Outback-involved lineup has expanded quite a bit in recent years; besides the cheaper Crosstrek, the firm now fields a true SUV, the Ascent. From a distance, it and the Outback are identical; the difference is in scale. The firm’s marketing is built around the concept of “love” — not the outmoded eros between a man and a woman or the hopelessly reactionary agape one might discern in God’s creation of heaven and earth, but the modern, commercialized, and utterly vacant “love” promoted on Netflix, between any number of consenting adults and/or consumer products.

Rarely does Subaru promote any particular mechanical or design excellence of their vehicles, which is reasonable because Honda and Toyota still have the upper hand in that area. Rather, the emphasis is on the ownership of a Subaru as an accessory to the life its owners really want. You don’t buy an Outback because you adore Outbacks, the way one might buy a Corvette out of excessive Corvette enthusiasm. Instead, you buy it because it fits into a corner of your largely non-car-centric, or even anti-car, lifestyle. One Subaru television ad made a big deal of the fact that their owners don’t care enough to wash them or keep them from being damaged. When you buy a Subaru, you are telling people that you don’t like cars very much. 

Happily for the brand, America has now caught up to Subaru’s message. Disliking the automobile is now an entire identity for many people, even among the automotive press. It’s never been more chic or acceptable to disdain the concepts of individual mobility and autonomy that drove the 20th-century American dream. In retrospect, Wieden & Kennedy was closer than it realized to the perfect message for Subaru. It just needed to expand the phrase. “Subaru: What to Drive… if you can’t stand driving.”

Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver and former columnist for Road & Track and Hagerty magazines who writes the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.

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