We remember the famous mountaineers like Sir Edmund Hillary but, apart from Tenzing Norgay, less well-known are the dedicated, dependable sherpas who complete the same ascent. So, too, with Subaru – we all know the Impreza and Legacy, even the GL/DL/Leone/Loyale that came before. Like the Sherpa people of Nepal, however, there’s a large number of local Subarus that go unnoticed by much of the world.
This is the Subaru Sherpa, known in the Japanese market as the Rex and in some other markets as the 600 or Mini Jumbo. As you can see by how two average-sized Aussie males appear to barely fit in it, this is no Jumbo. Measuring just 125.8 inches long and 54.9 inches wide, the Sherpa was a kei car and Subaru’s first with front-wheel-drive. The only engine offered here was a water-cooled, overhead cam 660cc two-cylinder four-stroke with 36hp and 39 ft-lbs. 0-60mph? Yes, but not much further than that.
I kid, of course. It hit 60mph in around 20 seconds, not bad considering a couple of rivals took around 30 seconds. Some rivals also had drum front brakes, the Sherpa receiving front discs. These weren’t complete ox carts, either, with rack-and-pinion steering and McPherson strut front suspension and trailing arms at the rear. They were light though – 1234 pounds – and they felt it, both in their remarkable manoeuvrability and also in their general, tinny feeling.
Don’t worry about these gents trying to wedge anybody in the back seat – there isn’t one. At least not in any Australian-market Sherpa, there isn’t. These, like the Daihatsu Handi and unimaginatively named Suzuki Hatch, took advantage of a tax loophole whereby they were classified as commercial vehicles and could therefore be priced lower purely because they were lacking rear seats.
The Australian government reclassified these as passenger car derivatives in the early 1980s, hiking the duty on them from 35 to 45 percent, but the Sherpa and its rivals continued to do a decent trade throughout the 1980s. Had they featured rear seats, they would’ve had a 57.5 percent duty slapped on them and been subject to Australian Design Rules that govern safety and emissions. That meant these cars got to skate out on having mandated safety features like side-impact beams.
Aussie magazines occasionally referred to the Sherpa and its rivals as “mini-vans”, which sounds hilarious now. Just one generation separates this Sherpa from the Subaru 360, called “cheap and ugly” by Malcolm Bricklin and, much more affectionately, “ladybug” by the Japanese.
Suzuki, Daihatsu and Subaru had this niche carved up between them but the Suzuki Hatch always seemed to be the most common. Sherpas here generally were the color of the hi-vis work attire of the featured car’s occupants. They’ve all largely disappeared from Aussie roads, though. Subaru brought the next-generation Rex here as the Fiori but it was short-lived and the whole segment eventually vanished.
In Japan, the Rex was available with four-wheel-drive and turbocharging but, of course, the desirable models were typically restricted to the home market. The Rex was stretched and widened, however, to create the Justy which was exported widely throughout the world.
While Subaru eventually stopped exporting kei cars, they never stopped making them. Trusty sherpas have continued to help Subaru ascend in the Japanese market, wearing unfamiliar, exotic names like Vivio and Pleo. They don’t get the glory but they’re just as reliable and dependable as bigger Subarus, even if we’re not familiar with them.
Photographed in Brisbane CBD, Queensland, Australia in October 2019. Additional photos courtesy of Turbo_J on Wikimedia Commons.
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Some of these car names are ironic; I knew this car as the Subaru 700, didn’t know it carried the same name as Leyland’s big van from the ’70s! There is one of these cars left in Barbados now (we only got them in five-door form) and it is an occasional use car. There is also only one Suzuki SS80 left, a four door model which is a daily driver. Both were very commonplace in the early 1980s when I returned here from the UK.
Makes me think of my cousins Subaru justy. He was a car killer par excellence and that little mutt survived ten years of him and our Canadian winters. Subarus of any stripe always impressed me after that!
Subaru did stop making kei cars back in 2011, offering rebadged Daihatsus since.
A similar tax loophole regarding being classified as a van also existed in Japan into the 1990s, a fair few of these 4WD turbo/supercharged kei cars were technically vans too, albeit with a simple backseat.
I thought it was a renamed Justy when I saw the first picture. Mine was the more aerodynamic facelifted model with 73 hp. I would have loved a turbocharger on mine. A 90 hp turboJusty with suspension upgrades would have been a nice ‘hot hatch’ for the 90s
The first airplane I ever rode in was a Shorts 330, which in military service is known as the C-23 Sherpa. You would have to look far and wide to find an uglier aircraft.
Cool! These scratch my “teeny, bare bones car” itch. They remind me a bit of the original Civic in their general shape. Although I suppose there’s only so much you can do with a shape in such a small space.
What a great name for a car such as this! I too thought it was just a slightly different Justy variant at first. The two dudes and their stuff fits, that’s all that matters to get them to the job…
Jim and William, I came here to post the same thing about this cars name. I think it was a stroke of genius – especially given that Subaru would eventually be all-AWD.
Well, I never would have guessed that a car named Rex and Sherpa would end up being a 600cc mini-car… perhaps that’s exceeded only by the amusement of calling these cars mini-vans.
I vaguely remember the Rex only because of the paragraph or two of coverage the turbo version received in the US press at the time, but never knew anything more.
And this featured car blends into its gold-hued background in the opening photo almost like it was meant to be there. Great shots of this little car. And in fact, I think the design is pretty good — it’s actually hard to judge just how small the car is without seeing it in context with a driver.
That first shot is very good – In fact at first glance I thought that was Big Ben in the background and was wondering why Will was in the UK, then I quickly scrolled to the second and thought it was San Francisco with the tip of the TransAmerica building in the background. Then I stopped and started over and figured it out… 🙂
20 seconds to 60MPH in a 36 horsepower car actually sounds impressive to me; aren’t those mighty close to the numbers that the early VW buses or some Mercedes diesels make?
Somewhere where I now can’t find it there’s a US test of a Microbus from (I think) about ’54, and 0-60 was something like 70 secs: in fact, it wasn’t meant to be driven over 50! There’s a ’65 Mercedes 190D test (manual, you could get auto) at 26 secs to 60.
More crazily, in ’83 you could still buy a Mercedes 240D auto, sold here and in the US as an expensive luxury car, which did 0-60 28 secs.
So this little Sherpa has the best times of any of them!
There was a fourdoor version a friend of mine had one recently it had only done 40,000kms when he got it the proverbial little old lady car new lower ball joints to get it a WOD proved to be a stumbling block Subaru NZ though having sold it new didnt have any parts, he got them somewhere at horrendous cost and later let the little toy go driving it didnt feel safe theres very little car around you if something goes wrong, cheap as on gas though, there was also the Subaru Ace which is roughly the same size and just as flimsy
Cool find on a car I’ve never heard of before! That was pretty sly yet clever of Suzuki to classify this as a commercial vehicle and thereby avoid higher taxes!
I have an allergic reaction to these utterly cynical pizza boxes, though perhaps I should direct part of that to the Fed Govt, for it was their idiotic rules which allowed what were already the physically weakest machines on the road to be legal while lacking a raft of basic secondary safety features via this “commercial” loophole.
I’m jaundiced by the permanent brain injuries suffered by an acquaintance who crashed her Mighty Boy in the late ’80’s. It was not a big crash, either.
It IS great photo, that first one, Mr S.