Subaru actually dropped the rear seats late in the BRAT's production run, by which point many customers had adopted the habit of removing the bed carpeting due to rust issues.

The bed-mounted rear-facing jump seats were an effort by Subaru to avoid the so-called chicken tax on imported pickups. The BRAT was based on the DL/GL sedan, and with four seats, Subaru could ...

This particular Brat was the upper-level GL trim, which came with a 1.8-liter, four-cylinder boxer engine, butterfly t-tops, a tilting steering wheel and all of the available stock gauges.

Related: Subaru had a solution for this costly hurdle in the form of rear-facing jump seats in the bed of BRAT, allowing the BRAT to qualify as a passenger car with merely a 2.5 percent tariff.

Subaru got around the tax by bolting a pair of rubber seats into the bed of what was a farming truck in Japan, then called it a car, er, Brat. It went for $4,900, at least $1,000 cheaper than it ...

One BRAT-ful of neophytes either forgot or never knew in the first place. They rolled their Subaru, instantly making it a 4x4 convertible. More nice work from the press crew.

Over at Subaru, the BRAT ran between 1978 and 1994 with four-cylinder lumps. Early models featured the EA71, a 1.6-liter boxer that cranks out 67 horsepower and 81 pound-feet (110 Nm) on full song.

The rear-facing seats — which Subaru labeled in brochures as "fun seats" — helped the BRAT avoid the worst of the Chicken Tax. In the end, it was still subjected to a 2.5% tariff imposed on ...