This year’s Japan Mobility Show is rife with battery electric sports car proposals. Sure, you might not anticipate such vehicles form Honda, Toyota and Nissan. But would you presume Subaru to create one? But in fact, they have. It’s the Subaru Sport Mobility Concept, an all-electric sports car concept boasting all-wheel-drive. The concept debuted at the Japan Mobility Show.
With minimmal surfaces and character lines and notable wheel arches, there are six light pixels within each headlamp, mirroring the six stars in Subaru‘s logo.
No details about the Subaru Sport Mobility Concept’s electric powertrain.
Subaru’s hatchback coupe is one vision of where its future design is heading. The company envisions half of its global volume, about 600,000 units, being fully electric by 2030. To get there, Subaru intends to offer eight EV models by that point. It’s therefore possible that this concept could reach showrooms as a future BRZ.
But that’s a tall order for one of the world’s smaller automakers.
Currently, the company sells one battery electric vehicle, the Subaru Solterra, a badge-engineered rendition of the Toyota bZ4x EV. Meanwhile, its sole sports car, the Subaru BRZ, is built jointly with Toyota. Nevertheless, Subaru has far more fingerprints on this coupe’s development than it does on the Solterra.
Still, both the Solterra and BRZ sell in relatively small volumes in the United States. Subaru retailed 919 Solterras and 3,345 BRZs in 2022 according to Automotive News. The automaker fared better in the first half of 2023, moving 2,972 Solterras and 2,512 BRZs.
But aside from the long-lived WRX and STI rally cars, the only sports car of any note from Subaru has been the 1991-97 SVX. The luxury sports coupe was a truly unlikely offering given most of Subaru’s lineup at the time. Designed by the legendary Giorgetto Giugiaro designed SVX, the striking sport coupe’s power came from a 230-horsepower 3.3-liter double-overhead cam horizontally-opposed six-cylinder engine. It was relatively fast for its time, with a 0-60 mph time of 7.3 seconds. And its design, featuring a window within a window, remains dramatic to this day.
Of course, there was also the long-forgotten funky 1985-91 Subaru XT, conceived as a flagship model for the American market. Offered with front-wheel or four-wheel drive, it was powered by a 94-horsepower 1.8-liter flat four, or the same engine with a turbocharger, upping the ponies to 111. A a 2.7-liter flat six was added for 1990.
Meanwhile, the Subaru Sport Mobility Concept is nearly as noticeable, and could prove to be a preview of a future battery-electric Subaru BRZ.
