I understand that the WRX has been around for many years, but only in 2002 has it arrived in the U.S. I'm wondering why did Subaru (and for that matter, Mitsu with it's EVO) wait so long before introducing it here. Was there *that* much of a downturn in the sports car market (with the demise of the 300ZX, Supra, etc.) that these cars wouldn't have made it in the mid 90s? Of course it is easy to do monday-morning quarterbacking, but it seems like there is so much demand now for the WRX and STI--couldn't the marketing dept. have realized that they could have been tapping into the performance market of the 90s with their WRX? Just wondering...

I apologize in advance if this topic, which surely has been considered before, was discussed in this forum. I tried to do a search, but it was hard to come up with precise search words which might have been used in a discussion...

-Andrew

 

Regulations mostly. Subaru did not want to invest in altering the design to meet US regulations until they were confident they could make some money over here.

 

drew2002 is correct; most of the Japanese sports cars were not brought over, or were watered down versions of their Japanese counterparts because of regulations. The two that prevented the export of these cars to the states are crash tests and emissions.

Emissions are pretty straightforward; Japanese regulations were not as strict as US regulations. However, the tightening of Japanese emissions regulations has caused the Skyline GT-R to be pulled out of production (as of last summer).

Crash regulations prevented cars like the Lancer and Skyline (and some problems with turbo placement interfering with left-side steering on the Skyline) from being brought over. A frontal crash at a certain speed (5 mph?) must cause no more than a certain dollar amount in damage. With the front mounted intercooler of both these cars, this was difficult since the intercooler is not a cheap part and it would get damaged in a frontal collision. I do not know how they fixed this in the US spec Evo currently out. I suppose one cheap fix would be to declare the factory intercooler as a cheap $100 part, but that's just a guess.

 

I think they added extra padding behind the plastic bumper cover to help protect the I/C at low speeds. Maybe stiffened up the 5 MPH bumper shocks too. That puts a little more impact inside the car, but less chance of wrecking the I/C.