Yahoo Autos Junkyard Gem: 1990 Subaru Legacy L Wagon
From the late 1960s through the late 1980s, Subaru was known in North America for small cars. Affordable and sometimes quirky cars, often equipped with very useful four-wheel-drive, but always small. That all changed in 1989, when the midsize Legacy first appeared here as a 1990 model. It became the best-selling U.S.-market Subaru model right away, and one of its evolutionary offshoots became the phenomenally successful Outback wagon. The junkyard is a fine place to study this sort of automotive history, and so here's one of the first examples of the Subaru Legacy sold in the United States.
Most of the interesting discarded Subarus I find show up in Colorado boneyards, since Coloradans have loved the Pleiades-badged cars of Fuji Heavy Industries since the first four-wheel-drive Leones showed up, but this one is in Northern California.
The build tag shows that this car was built at the Yajima plant a couple of months before the first Legacy rolled off the Subaru-Isuzu Automotive (now wholly owned by Subaru) assembly line in Indiana.
There were just two trim levels for the original U.S.-market Legacy: the base L and the upscale LS. This car is a front-wheel-drive L wagon, which had an MSRP of $13,049 (about $30,400 in 2023 dollars). That compared favorably to the cheapest Toyota Camry FWD wagon ($13,768, or $32,074 now); Honda didn't introduce the longroof Accord here until the 1991 model year. Meanwhile, Detroit still offered ample selection for station wagon shoppers, including the more spacious Ford Taurus GL wagon for $14,722 ($34,297 today).
Subaru was well-known here for four-wheel-drive and all-wheel-drive cars by 1990, but the full American-market product line didn't go fully AWD until the 1996 model year. This car is an ordinary front-driver, though it does have the optional automatic transmission instead of the base five-speed manual. If you wanted a Legacy L wagon with all-wheel-drive (still called "full-time four-wheel-drive" by Subaru at that point, because new Loyales were still available with driver-selected four-wheel-drive at the time), the price was $14,249 ($33,195 after inflation).
This car served its owner or owners well, traversing close to 300,000 miles during its near-quarter-century on the road.
