After a decade of seeing the batshit Impreza WRX on the streets of North America, the idea of a fast, goofy-looking, four-wheel-drive Subaru seems pretty normal to all of us. This was not the case in 1985, when Subaru introduced the (somewhat) fast, goofy-looking, four-wheel-drive XT.
"What the hell is that thing?" asked American car shoppers, backing away from the Subaru dealership in dismay, and sales of the XT remained weak for its seven-year production run.
Looking something like a squashed fourth-gen Celica, with semi-hallucinatory elements of the Olds Trofeo thrown in for good measure, the XT eventually got a 145-horsepower boxer six up front and was dubbed the XT6 (Japanese buyers got the far cooler Alcyone name). The all-wheel-drive, six-cylinder '91 XT6 listed at $18,318, more than seven grand cheaper than BMW's all-wheel-drive, six-cylinder 325iX... and yet how many of the weird wedge-shaped Subarus do you see on the street today for every BMW E30 you see (we won't even bring up the far cheaper Mazda 323 GTX here)?
The passage of a couple of decades hasn't taken much of the edge off the XT's weird appearance, and by modern standards its performance numbers are pretty dull, but I still want one.
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