Subaru BRZ future unclear

The Subaru BRZ faces an uncertain future.

Despite being a critical and sales success for the brand, there has been no confirmation from Subaru executives that the next generation model is in the works.

Speaking at the launch of the new Impreza in Japan last week, Subaru Australia managing director Nick Senior was was non-committal on the future of BRZ beyond confirming the mid-life facelift arrives shortly.

Asked if a second generation BRZ was decided Senior said: "I haven't seen it on the product planning charts, but there's talk of it. So I'm not sure."

But Senior did give his support to the sports car because of its ability to bring younger customers to the brand, which is a major push for Subaru.

"It's brought new customers to the brand, there's no doubt about it, younger customers," he explained. "And where it has been beneficial is younger customers that are sportier orientated, have been probably not ready or probably couldn't afford a WRX, but we're seeing a few BRZ people – as they get a bit older and their income rises they move to a WRX.

"So in that sense it's good for the brand, as it has introduced those people where we may not have got them if we didn't have it, they may have gone to another brand. Once you're with another brand they've got first crack at you next time, so it's hard to pull them away."

Attracting younger and more female buyers to the brand was a key point for the newly developed Subaru Global Platform that underpins the latest Impreza.

"That's part of our challenge with Impreza," Senior said. "Is to get more younger people, more females into Subaru, and give them a Subaru experience that's enjoyable for them, hopefully then you can keep them in the brand."

The move to the Subaru Global Platform is also expected to lead to a wider gap between the Impreza and the WRX as the firm tries to create a different audience for the two models. But the next WRX, based on the new Global Platform, is not expected to be launched until 2018 so Senior didn't reveal any details.

"It's still far away, but look it certainly does give that opportunity to move further from Impreza, as you say," Senior said.

"Now what that looks like – I've got no idea."

Senior did, however, reveal he would like to add more performance to the Subaru Australia range in the short-term by expanding on the success of the Forester tS. That model was based on the popular SUV but tuned by the brand's performance arm STI.

"It has been good," he said.

"As you know the car was taken off the production line here and then finished by STI, and we were building them in lots of 50 per month. The last 50 just arrived, so at the end of this month we're going to do a review to find out the learnings on what we could do differently. And hopefully out of that it provides the opportunity for us to come up with doing other ones in the future."

The most likely candidates to earn tS treatment are the Liberty, XV and Levorg, but Senior stopped short of confirming any plans despite his happiness with the Forester.

"Yeah, I think it's been positive," he said. "Where it's harder is performance, but certainly the theme of the tS we will look at in the future. It will be small and on the right occasions it won't be flooding the market."

He added: "Liberty with the 3.6 could be one that potentially we could look at doing something, so yeah that's possibly one.

"You've got Forester XT, Liberty 3.6s, Levorgs and things like that. So we're lucky to be doing a few sporty derivatives."

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