Subaru Impreza 22B
Why 2.8: Four hundred widebody coupes celebrating three WRC titles, now trading in McLaren money. The rally car for the road became the rally car for the vault — the sharpest trophy conversion in JDM history.
Layout
Natural habitat
Ride comfort
Sound
The unequal-length headers give the boxer its unmistakable off-beat rumble, and no other engine is identifiable from further away. It is character rather than beauty, and the turbo smothers most of what happens up top.
4-cylinder · turbocharged · 7,000 rpm redline · rated 6.5 / 10 for engine sound
Market value
Median asking price, good condition · €55k (2005) → €294k (2026), trending up · illustrative data
Child seats · ISOFIX
ISOFIX was spreading through these years rather than fitted across the board — whether a given car has rear anchors depends on its year and market.
Children were expected in the back. Front-passenger ISOFIX effectively didn't exist in this era, and airbag deactivation was patchy — treat the front seat as a no unless a specific car proves otherwise.
Derived from production years and seating layout, not a per-car source. ISOFIX was standardised as ISO 13216 in 1997, required on new EU model types from 2011 and on all new EU cars from 2014.
The long version
These sold in Japan for well under fifty grand and spent years as the car a certain kind of rally obsessive would grey-import at real financial pain just to drive — and some still do, tuning knowledge for the EJ22 engine passed down like folklore. That world has been almost entirely priced out by collector demand chasing the 400-unit story and the WRC pedigree; six-figure sales now draw bidders who could not tell an N-spec from an S-spec. The rare owner who still autocrosses theirs gets treated like a local celebrity, mostly because everyone else's 22B has not left the trailer in years.