Badge engineering is back in full force at Toyota as the new majority owners of the Subaru brand extend their hold on a fellow Japanese car maker. The new Subaru Dex is based on the Daihatsu Materia but has a Subaru badge on it. We saw lots of this kind of practice in the 1980s with cars like the Mazda 323/ Ford Tracer and even recently with Ford Ranger and Mazda Drifter.
The Dex is powered, if you can call it that, by a 1.3-litre engine with a 4-speed automatic gearbox. None of this sounds remotely like Subaru; no boxer engine, no 4WD system and a less-than satisfactory 4-cog auto.
We sincerely hope that chasing sales doesn’t end up killing the unique Subaru brand as it threatens to with the current, irrelevant 1.5-litre Impreza hatch.
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