Subaru is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its horizontally-opposed 'Boxer' engine which first saw service in the Subaru 1000 compact passenger car.
The Boxer engine is so called due to its pistons resembling the punch-counterpunch motion of a boxer's fists.
Since 1966, Subaru has sought to maximise the advantages of its Boxer engines and continuously enhanced them to power its vehicles to this day. Today, every vehicle sold by Subaru is fitted with a Boxer engine, with total production over the last 50 years topping 16 million.
With the horizontally-opposed design of the Boxer engine, the opposing pistons work to cancel out the inertia force of each other, resulting in less vibration and superb rotational balance to provide smooth acceleration right up to the highest engine speeds. Its compact form also allows it to be fitted lower in the engine bay than a conventional four-in-line engine, lowering the centre of gravity.
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