TRICKEST TRUCKLET AROUND.(Escape Roads)

Byline: JOHN D. STOLL

If automakers have mascots, the Brat best fits Subaru's bill.

In 1977 Subaru started importing a car-based trucklet it called the Brat, for Bi-drive Recreational All-terrain Transporter. We called it the "littlest RV'' when we drove it that summer, adding that it was the answer to a question no one had asked. Subaru of America co-founder Harvey Lamm snatched the first one off the boat and went to work outfitting the car in an eccentric manner-CB, antennae and all.

As it turns out, '77 would be a watershed year for Subaru, and Lamm had a front-row seat. When SOA had listed on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange in 1968, Lamm, along with Malcolm Bricklin, convinced banks to lend them $100,000 to buoy the IPO. Once they secured funding, hundreds of Beetle-like 360s developed by Fuji Heavy Industries started coming Stateside. A year later, the more legitimate FF-100 joined the fleet.

Bricklin left the struggling SOA in 1971, but Lamm stayed on, swelling annual sales nearly 500 percent over six years.

Lamm's Brat is nothing short of a rolling demonstration of a quirky tenacity that has followed Subaru into present-day automobiledom. Sporting a rudimentary version of Subaru's all-wheel drivetrain, which earned it the Fuji engineer-assigned nickname "Bastard,'' the car would help legitimize four-wheel-drive technology beyond the realm of heavy trucks. A shifter mounted to the right of the four-speed manual stalk let drivers switch on the fly, and a niche beachcomber/mudslinger was born.

The Brat came to America at a time when the chicken tax, enacted to counteract Europe's levy on imported poultry, was blocking importers from selling high volumes of pickups. Importers shipped trucks to U.S. docks in two pieces, then slapped them together on shore. Subaru got around the tax by bolting a pair of rubber seats into the bed of what was a farming truck in Japan, then called it a car, er, Brat. It went for $4,900, at ...