you guys probably knew this but I just read in Automobile magazine that the Subaru boxer was copied from a Borgward engine design. It said that the first boxers could swap parts with a Borgward. This was pretty common for many Japanese machines at the time of course.

you guys probably knew this but I just read in Automobile magazine that the Subaru boxer was copied from a Borgward engine design. It said that the first boxers could swap parts with a Borgward. This was pretty common for many Japanese machines at the time of course.

Here is a photo of the Borgward engines that I remember,

Doesn't look like a boxer engine to me. By the way, this is a 1954 model year.

 

Well, did some further reseach. It looks like in the mid 50's Borgward Lloyd division did produce a boxer 4 cylinder, water cooled engine, a version of that engine was used in the early 70's GLF Subarus. I couldn't find a picture of that engine, still looking.

Fascinating tidbit, cookie! I had assumed that Subaru patterned its boxer concept on the ubiquitous early VW. But I always wondered--it would take quite a leap of imagination and engineering to water cool it (not that early Subaru engineers were incapable of doing so, but I'm sure they were under financial and time pressures to get something on the road.)

 

I'm old enough to remember Borgwards! So your comment sent me a-googling. Turns out that prior to WWII Borgward built Hansa, Lloyd and Goliath vehicles--dropped the Hansa name after the war because of unpleasant connections to Nazi Germany.

 

Sometime in the 1940s (during or after the war?) Lloyd developed a small 900cc water-cooled 4 cylinder boxer engine. That's undoubtedly the progenitor of our modern Subie design.

 

If the parts truly could be interchanged, as stated, I wonder if Subaru had a licensing agreement with Borgward?

 

Any other interesting bits in the Automobile article?

Not much there really. The Japanse licensed a lot of things before and after the war as well as copying freely without license. I have Canon and Nikon cameras that freely take Lieca and the Ziess Ikon lenses they were copied from. Each time there was an improvement though.

We gave Toyota a contract to manufacture the Land Cruiser after the war to get them back to work. They copied the Chevy army truck fo most of the bits.I used to swap Chevy parts into the early LCs as I had trouble getting Japanese bits. Datsun started manufacturing the Austin 10 under license as did BMW. In the 60s you could use a Datsun pickup head to fix an MGA. Datsun even did some of the same wiring mistakes Lucas used to and thier blocks persisted in using the English style useless endplates for years.

We even got to see some of the engines and aircraft parts they licensed from us at Pearl Harbor.