Imagine, if you can, a truck with factory-mounted seats in the bed — and spotlights the size of a 747’s landing lights mounted on its T-topped roof.
If you know this truck, you also know why it’s no longer available.
Such fun things are no longer allowed.
They are not saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafe! “Moms” are “concerned”!
But in 1977, the Safety Cult — which ended such fun things — was still a backwater aberration, like dancing with rattlesnakes — and most people still esteemed fun over fear. There were roofless Broncos and K5 Blazers — and cars with beds.
You could buy all kinds of different stuff back when America was still a fairly free country — and the Subaru BRAT was as different as it got.
BRAT — all caps — was short for Bi-Drive Recreational All-Terrain Transporter. It was superficially similar to other small import pickups of the ’70s, such as the Datsun 620 and similar models from Toyota (SR5), Mazda (B210), and Chevy (via Isuzu) Luv.
But unlike them, it was a four seater — with two of the four in the bed, facing the other way. The seats were made of all-weather plastic and far from the most comfortable — but the view was spectacular. Watching the world recede as you progressed is another one of many freedoms denied today in the name of “safety”.
Subaru wasn’t “unconcerned” about “safety”. Grab handles — to keep passengers from bouncing out of the bed — were included. Though holding onto them made it harder to reach for a cold one in the cooler. That was another fun thing people did in pickups back in the day — before the Safety Cult put the kibosh on that, too.
The seats were actually a dodge — of a federal fatwa known as the “chicken tax”, which was a retaliatory tariff of 25 percent applied to import-brand pickups manufactured outside the United States as tit-for-tat for tariffs applied by foreign countries to American chicken exported outside the United States.
The “chicken tax” hit trucks with just two seats — at the time almost exclusively the small import models, which didn’t offer the extended and crew cab configurations that are commonplace today.
By adding the extra seats in the bed, BRAT qualified as a passenger vehicle rather than a “light truck”, and thus Subaru evaded the chicken tax on a happy technicality — and was also able to sell the BRAT for less than two-seater rivals that had the cost of the tax folded into their MSRP.
Eric Peters, “Doomed: Subaru BRAT (1977-87)”, The American Spectator, 2020-04-26.
June 13, 2025
QotD: The Subaru BRAT
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