Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday.
They Only Raised The WRX Price $1,025
I have not decided how I feel about the new Subaru WRX. The car had a good run as the best value in performance cars because of its racy AWD and lack of real competitors. The Civic Type R, Golf R, short-lived Focus RS, Elantra N, and incoming 2024 Acura Integra Type-S changed all that. How to best describe my feelings of the previous-gen WRX… it’s like when you go to your favorite donut shop and you want a cinnamon sugar braid and all they have is regular glazed and you think “Yeah, sure, a glazed donut is good enough.” The outgoing WRX is a glazed donut. The redesigned WRX, which went on sale last year, has leaned more into the car’s rally history and now looks more like a dirt-tossing mongoose than a track rat. I respect the hustle and have no good donut metaphor for this and am starting to realize I’m actually quite hungry. With 271 horsepower from it’s 2.4-liter boxer four it’s marginally competitive. By comparison, an Elantra N offers 276 horsepower and a Type R pumps out 315.
It’s 2022 and everything expensive so what I respect the most about the new WRX for 2023 is that it’s still an OK value. A Civic Type R costs a whopping $43,990 including a $1,095 freight charge. The new WRX is just $30,605, only $1,000 over the outgoing car, or $31,625 with a destination and the manual (the destination fee went up $25 to $1,020, so overall the price is up $1,025). In an era when carmakers are sneaking $1,500 upgrades into their cars, I suppose the increase could be worse. The WRX GT tops out at $44,415 with destination and includes fancy seats, EyeSight, paddle-shifters (it’s auto only), and 18-inch wheels. No thanks. Is it a better value than the Elantra N? Ehh… I need to drive the current WRX to say. Maybe? The appeal of the WRX is that it’s a WRX and if a WRX appeals to you then the new WRX is the WRX to get. If you don’t need a WRX the 2024 Subaru Impreza 2.5 RS is not a performance car but is a fine hatchback. WRX. [Editor’s note: “ONLY 1,000?” Only? For the same car? Seems like Stockholm Syndrome, Matt. -DT]. [Writer’s note: It’s worth keeping in mind that the base WRX doesn’t include features like heated seats and automatic headlights linked with the wipers. If you want more amenities in your new sport compact car, the WRX’s value isn’t as strong as it could be due to the new price hike. -Thomas Hundal]
Ford Wins Six ‘What Van?’ Awards
You ever notice that everyone (not us) does awards at the end of the year? Seems like a weird coincidence. Cynical people will say that these outlets are selling their awards and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen definitive proof of that. In most cases, you can assume the journalists doling out the awards are being honest in how they evaluate vehicles. What gets sold is not the award itself, necessarily, but the accolades. Did you know that if I said “The Skoda Superb is the greatest car to ever exist and will bring you untold riches and the love of everyone you desire and the fealty of everyone you despise” and Skoda wanted to use that quote in an ad or a billboard they’d have to pay the Autopian money for that? I don’t say this to completely shade these awards as readers want to hear what car gets what and it makes for good copy. I just think it’s important context. The exception to this, of course, has to be the fine folks at British van rag ‘What Van?‘ I am legitimately curious about their choices and respect the van love. I’ve been watching them do this for years and I usually agree with their results. They handed out six awards to Ford this year, including:
Large Van of the Year: Ford E-Transit Van of the Year (overall): Ford E-Transit Medium Van of the Year: Ford Transit Custom Used Van of the Year: Ford Transit Custom Editor’s Choice: Ford’s ‘Make it Visible’ Suicide Prevention campaign What Van? Hall Of Fame Inductee: Mandy Dean, Ford of Britain/Ireland’s Commercial Vehicle Director
A bit of controversy, though, cannot be ignored. Ford E-Transit won the big overall award, but it was actually the commercial version of the VW ID.Buzz that won the electric van category. I can only imagine the gasps in the crowd during the lunchtime ceremony.
What Is Turkey’s Game?
Russia continues to make money off of energy exports even with all the sanctions, which is why Western governments in the G7 recently announced a price cap on Russian oil that forces tankers carrying the black stuff to accept a price of $60 or less or risk losing insurance from European providers. According to Reuters, this is causing some issues. Specifically, tankers are lining up at the Bosphorus strait waiting for Turkish authorities to let them pass. The Turkish government says this is due to wanting to make sure these tankers have proper insurance related to the potential change in the value of their cargo. The G7 governments (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the US) say it’s not on them: What’s not clear, immediately, is what Erdogan wants. We’ll probably find out soon.
The UAW Organizes Its First Battery Plant
Workers at the Ultium Cells LLC plant in Warren, Ohio, voted 710-16 in favor of joining the United Auto Workers union. In case it wasn’t obvious, the Ultium plant is owned by General Motors in a tie-up with LG Energy Solution. Here’s some important context from The Detroit News: The GM Lordstown plant is right next year so this will be interesting to watch. “The successful organizing of the new wave of electric battery manufacturing is essential to the UAW’s future position,” said Marick Masters, a professor at Wayne State University’s Mike Ilitch School of Business, in a statement. “Its victory in the recent election to organize the Ultium facility represents a milestone in its path toward this end. Now the challenge is to meld the representation of these workers into the overall fabric of the auto negotiations so as protect jobs and wages.”
The Flush
It’s late at night. You’re happily asleep dreaming of a pristine Isuzu Impulse RS. Suddenly, you’re jolted awake by your kid who is claiming she can’t go back to sleep without ‘Cho-Cho-Chokey’ a cat she hasn’t played with in three years. You go digging through their closet and find an old laptop. A thought hits you like a jolt of lighting! Back in college your friend couldn’t pay for pizza and gave you two Bitcoin for it. Those two Bitcoin are on a wallet on that computer. You ignore your kid and run to transfer that money into cash while you can and end up with $34,324. You’ve got to buy a new performance car. What do you get?
Read more on The Autopian
The 2024 Subaru Impreza Revives The Impreza 2.5 RS And Kills The Sedan Here’s Every Car The $43,990 Honda Civic Type R Competes With The 276 Horsepower 2022 Hyundai Elantra N Is A Blue Collar Sports Sedan Revelation
Got a hot tip? Send it to us here. Or check out the stories on our homepage. Support our mission of championing car culture by becoming an Official Autopian Member. Photos: Mitsui OSK Lines, Ford, Subaru, GM Except for the Outback, the new 5th gen seems more outback-y than ever! The WRX seems designed at random, like someone rebadged a very boring family saloon to hide the fact it’s just a very fuel inefficient boxer. And the new Impreza? Oh god. No flavor, the most generic design I’ve seen in a long time. Compared to the Koreans, this makes me sad. The recently announced XV isn’t much better. I also remember someone here mentioning that a FWD Japan-market XV actually drives much better than the AWD version (bad conditions being the rare exception). I’m really tempted to get an Outback as my next car, or the Levorg – although with the latter the engine choice in Europe is sad (1.6 turbo direct injection pre-facelift, 2.0 atmospheric port-side injection after facelift; slightly fun vs boring but reliable). But if my intuition is correct and Subaru is slowly fading, I don’t know where else to turn. For context: my first car was a 2005 Outback 3.0R, until it rusted away. Second was a Mazda CX-7, which taught me to hate SUVs with a passion. And now I have a Honda Civic 1.8 Tourer, the EU model. The Civic is a fun story also. With EU sales faling and our models being made in Swindon, UK, Honda closed the factory down. Which, as I recently found out, means end of production to certain spare parts – for a 6yo car! What times we live in! Perhaps they’ve fixed all those issues for the 2023 model, all for a $1000 increase 🙂
