The Story of the Subaru 360 in Australia
as told by Ian Newman., a member of
the Subaru
360 Driver's Club
and the Motoring
Historians of Western Australia
Back in 1961, a car dealer in Ballarat, Victoria (Australia) called
Frank O'Brien
decided to try out importing a batch of Subaru 360s. His story
appeared in the
August 1961 edition of "Wheels" magazine (Aussie motoring mag).
It was entitled
"Oriental Mini-Motoring".
Now fast forward to 1980, and a friend and I drove from Perth to
Melbourne on
a car-discovery trip (look it up on a map - we used to do it regularly
back then!),
and as I was just becoming a "Japanese car collector", on a whim I
decided to try
to see if I could chase up this Frank O'Brien from the twenty-year-old
Wheels
article - if he was still around!
Well after a bit of detective work, we struck gold and to cut a long
story short,
we actually got to meet him at his truck tender yard, just south of
Ballarat, in
a town called Sebastapol. He still had a few of the sedans in his
yard, gathering
dust/rotting and in various stages of disrepair. They were the Maia
cars - probably
1960 to 1961. He told me that he had imported around 73 vehicles
in all, in a three
year period - broken down into (approx.): 40 Sedans, 15 Trucks and 15
Vans (all
Right Hand Drive of course).
The sedans had the larger 423 cc "EK-51" engine, but they were
unfortunately
found to be prone to overheating - Subaru Japan tried all they could to
fix the
problem but to no avail, despite three trips over there by Mr O'Brien.
In the end,
this was found (by accident) to be mainly due to #1 piston being
pre-heated by
#2., linked with a problem in the oiling of the automatic
advance. They found
that the engine could be timed anywhere within a 360 degree
(distributor) range,
and that when timed with the oil entry point towards the top, the oil
was reluctant
to travel "uphill" and consequently starvation occurred. The
answer was to time
the engine on the bottom half, so the oil would not have to run
uphill. All this was
by now, too little too late for Mr O'Brien, as he had been losing money
due to the
overheating problem, and the dealership was doomed. It was indeed
unfortunate
that things had not worked out for the better. Once fixed, the
vehicles hummed
along quite reliably - Mr O'Brien once drove "flat out" to Sydney
non-stop (many
hours driving - at least eight - away) with the car "not missing a
beat". Top speed
was apparently around 63 miles per hour.
Another sad Subaru 360 importation tale.
if you have any additional
information about the history of the Subaru 360
in Australia, please email
me.
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