This ’90s Subaru Concept Was the Missing Link Between the Brat and the Baja

I like Subaru. It’s a brand that embraces its image and sticks to what its biggest fans want, which is more than you can say of most. However, I’ll never forgive it for this. In the early ’90s, Subaru designed a car that was an equal-parts wagon and pickup truck, which would have been one of the coolest family cars ever. It was called the Subaru Suiren—Japanese for “water lily”—but sadly, it died in the concept stage.

Subaru first showed the Suiren to the public at the 1993 Tokyo Motor Show, and supposedly, it was meant to replace the beloved Brat. Based on the contemporary Impreza, the Suiren was essentially a ute with two doors, four seats, and a small pickup truck bed, but with the stance of a car. It also came with a removable hard top canopy for the bed, which would effectively turn it into a two-door wagon. The canopy had massive side windows that kept it from feeling like a normal pickup truck bed cap; they were apparently made from shatterproof plastic, too. Like the Subaru Baja that wouldn’t arrive for almost another decade, the Suiren had a folding midgate bulkhead between the bed and cabin to store longer items.

OK, so maybe Subaru should have left the Suiren’s design in the oven a little while longer, because it wasn’t exactly pretty. It introduced the world to Subie’s bug-eye front-end, which was fine, but it looked weird and misshapen with the canopy in place. As a pickup, though, it looked pretty good.

Under that oddball design was mostly typical Subaru. It had a 2.5-liter flat-four under its hood and a full-time all-wheel drive system, using the brand’s famous viscous-coupling center differential. However, it’s what could be sandwiched in between those that was interesting. While it was offered with a conventional manual transmission, according to Drive.au, Subaru also co-developed a new automatic for the Suiren with Prodrive—the same Prodrive that builds race cars. It was a semi-automated sequential gearbox that could shift manually via steering wheel-mounted buttons and would have been revolutionary in 1993. In the current world of CVT-only Subarus, hearing about any sort of ambitious automatic makes me both happy and sad.

Sadly, the Tokyo Motor Show was as far as the Suiren went. Instead, Subaru ended up replacing the Brat with the four-door Baja in 2002. At least the Baja kept the midgate.

What a cool world it could have been with two-door utes running around, doubling as wagons when needed.

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