![]() ![]() Because it’s a symmetrical layout with a north-south crankshaft, the driveline is able to extend from the front of the engine right through to the rear wheels. One of the beauties of a boxer engine is its balance. Incidentally, that first boxer engine from Subaru was rated at 977cc and developed a mere 55bhp, a far cry from today’s sophisticated, powerful engines. Their resultant ‘punching’ motion gave rise to the term ‘boxer’ because the designers believed that the action of the pistons and the conrods suggested a boxer in a fight, fists punching backwards and forwards on successive strokes. There are two pistons on either side of the central crankshaft which operate horizontally in the block, rather than vertically. With a boxer engine, the pistons and rods are horizontally-opposed to each other. In the majority of engines produced these days, the pistons are connected to the crankshaft via conrods which force the pistons up and down vertically (or in the case of “Vee” engines, almost vertically) in the block. The engines were chosen for much the same reason that the car engines are today – compact design combined with low weight.īut back to our description of boxer engines. Subaru were linked to the Nakajima company, which built Zero fighter boxer aircraft engines in Japan during World War 2, and which later became Fuji Heavy Industries, the current name of the Subaru parent company. The origins of the engine go back further than that, though. How things have moved on in the past 55 years. On its release, the Subaru 1000 was not only the first Japanese car to use that type of engine, it was also Japan’s first mass-produced front-wheel drive sedan. The Subaru 1000 was a new, family sized car, which was to use an engine that has been used in every production Subaru since that time – the boxer. ![]() Subaru's 2.0-litre, turbocharged flat-four boxer engine. ![]()
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