Subaru are not going to market the WRX or STi versions of the Impreza in several countries, including the UK. They cite falling demand and trouble meeting emissions requirements. Supporters of the cars will be quick to seize on the emissions issues as the Real Reason, but if the demand was there, they’d soon find a way of cleaning up the exhaust.
All of which lead me to ask the question — are we witnessing the end of an era? Or if not the end, the beginning of the end.
Once upon a time, in the not so distant past, the herculean task taken on themselves by the editors of car magazines in New Zealand and Australia was the match the latest Subaru Gee-Whizzer up against the opposition. And that opposition was, of course, the latest evolution of the equally white-knuckle drive from Mitsubishi.
Awaiting the arrival of the latest WRX/EVO was like awaiting the second arrival. These were Cult Cars. In fact, the EVO was such a cult car that it was the name chosen for a British magazine devoted to high performance cars!
For months in advance of the birth of the latest model, carefully leaked information and the occasional sneak or spy image would come our way and we’d all dutifully salivate and behave like 14 year old schoolboys seeing a photograph of Milf Queen Demi Moore naked.
And readers just lapped it up.
Getting the latest Gee-Whizzer for a road test was usually easy enough — the distributors knew of the pent-up lust among readers, but the trick was getting the opposition car for a road test at the same time, ergo, a comparison. Or A COMPARISON!
Manufacturers always try to avoid direct comparisons, particularly if your car is older than the competitor’s latest model.
These were heady times.
But it wasn’t just WRX versus EVO that got the journos and the readers hot, it was also HSV versus FPV — the big brawny brutes from Australia.
The level of interest these car generated was amazing — we simply could not get enough of them. No matter how minute the piece of information was on any upcoming new model, it became headline material for the atomotive media.
It’s now four years since I quit writing about new cars and in that period I thought that I detected a lessening of interest.
Of course, Mitsibishi’s decision to drop the EVO model and Subaru’s decision to quite the WRC had a huge impact.
And the price of fuel, increasingly tough traffic law enforcement and a quite dramatic drop in sales of the big Australians across the market has rubbed the shine off HSV and FPV a bit.
I feel a bit sad about it because the hunt and the chase for both information and getting your hands on cars to write about was very much the stuff we all lived on in the era, 1995 – 2008 or so.
But I also have to ask if the old traditional, tribal Holden versus Ford thing on which a multi-million dollar clothing and memorabilia industry was based isn’t also starting to wane just a bit.
Setting up the huge merchandise marquees at V8 Supercar meetings was one of the first jobs that team did to cash in on the need of fans to wear the latest cap, Tee shirt or jacket.
In fact, so lucrative was the income stream from the sales of this merchandise that it was the fuel on which many teams ran.
Yeah, the fans are still strident about which car they support — WRX, EVO, HSV, FPV, Ford or Holden, but are the cries of support a little more muted?
If this is the end of an era, or even the beginning of the end, I’m glad I lived and worked through it. They were great days.
— Allan Dick
