Gadgetory

now the story goes that Subaru almost bailed on Toyota in their partnership to make this car apparently sube thought it was kind of not them to make anything it's front engine and rear-wheel drive it's been a long time for them luckily they thought about it and thought better because the result is one of the great affordable honest sports cars in the last 45 years let's drive the 2013 Subaru BRZ four out of 2000gt Datsun 240z Mazda Miata the pantheon of cars of this ilk is pretty small but pretty well loved but the last time Subaru made anything one engine and rear drive was 1954 something called the 1500 it's not anybody's Pantheon except perhaps mr. Magoo's now the BRZ is basically built on a revised version of the Impreza platform so you could say it shares some DNA with the WRX but the familiar relationship is a bit distant as you can see weight savings a big part of the story though that hoods always aluminum that roof never has glass in it and that back-end is always a trunk not a hatch now under the VR Z's featherweight aluminum hood you're gonna find a 2-liter flat-4 engine classic Subaru boxer stuff four cylinders horizontally opposed to per each side kind of lives right over the front axle line neither four or aft it has both port and direct injection which is sort of the new fashion these days two litres of displacement gets you 200 horsepower a rather tepid 151 foot-pounds of torque however we're going to encounter that on the road in a minute zero to sixty though happens in a happy enough 657 seconds for a car that is a little 2800 pounds that's pretty stoked by today's standards you're gonna get 20 to 30 mpg with a six-speed or a much better 25 34 if you get the automatic but don't all these cars go out to the 6-speed manual as a base configuration it's more for that Auto and they all go to the rear wheels through a limited slip differential Subaru put that money in the right place this is standard so I applaud Subaru for throwing that in basically but it's not much to write home about the interface is just okay there's also a voice command but yeah they also squandered the opportunity to give this car a rear camera here's the screen but a rear cam is not even available overall the navigation system is entirely functional but it's not a pretty interface on the audio side AM and FM both have HD radio ability there's satellite radio as you can see bluetooth streaming they've also got a USB and an aux jack down here on the console and it'll also handle SMS text now the first thing you notice about the BRZ is it's got this little flat spot which we've seen before and some of the Edmonds charts on the dyno and it doesn't have a lot of torque to begin with as I've pointed out 150 something foot pounds is not prodigiously Rev the way a Honda s2000 used to and the balance of Knights if you take the rear end out easily if you look down here I've got this stability control sport profile it keeps you a little bit out of trouble you need to keep this guy on cam more or less for thousands and above keeps you in the power bands the way it feels to me very light car not just in the numbers but it's really light it the way it feels not every light car feels light this one does and it's quite responsive when you want to get a snap here we're going to triple-eight on our track the ass feel stupid the rigidity of this car is one of the things that sets it apart from some of the other vehicles of this type that are open tops that's got a good top on it to keep things really firm and rigid and I'm not a huge fan of the note of subaru Motors usually but this one sounds great and it revs real freely and it's a happy little engine now pricing the BRZ CNET style is an exercise in simplicity you start with the base car 25 for 95 delivered then add the limited package that's $2,000 more that's gonna get you fog lights high-intensity discharge headlights leather trim a spoiler on the back and automatic temperature control there's an $1,100 option for an automatic but you're not going to do that you