The Subaru Justy is a compact hatchback automobile produced in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The Justy was equipped with a 1.2 L three-cylinder engine and either a standard manual transmission or a novel type of automatic transmission known as a Continuously variable transmission, or CVT. The CVT technology was employed because with a conventional automatic transmission performance would have been unacceptable, due to the small 3-cylinder engine.
The manual transmission version of the Justy had excellent mechanical reliability and fuel economy.
However, it was small and noisy as one would expect of an economy hatchback. Also, because the engine
had only three cylinders, idling was quite rough. The five-speed manual transmission worked reliably,
but was far from smooth to operate because its synchronizers were not very good.
The CVT version was actually able to get reasonable acceleration out of the small engine, but was unfortunately quite unreliable.
Since the novel automatic transmission was so unreliable, and the manual transmission, while reliable, was not enjoyable to operate, the Justy was never a very popular model, and Subaru abandoned it in many export markets after a few years.
In Europe, Suzuki Motors built the Justy for Subaru at its Hungarian plant. It was merely a rebadged Suzuki Swift. In 2004, the Justy name continued in European markets on a rebadged Suzuki Ignis.
