- 8
- Mountain View
Hi, I'm a new guy here. I've been looking into the Subaru 360, the car that gets mocked by so many people. Can't say I blame them, going by its GT2 performance in stock form. Trouble is, while the Subaru 360 obviously could never be a speed demon, GT2's version is a lot more crippled than it should be. The real car should at least have been able to beat many of GT2's slower kei cars.
(This is a long post. To summarize: GT2's Subaru 360 is actually the Young SS sport version, its transmission's final drive ratio is much too low, and there's some weird effect slowing down its engine spin-up. Also, even with the transmission fixed and ignoring engine spin-up, its track performance on flying laps is much slower than it should be based on its weight-to-power ratio, so there's something else slowing it down.)
First of all, I should clarify what version of the 360 this is. Though GT2 never mentions this (at least not in the North American version), its Subaru 360 is not the standard 1969 model but the Young SS sport model, the most powerful 360 version. That model was never exported from Japan. Its engine had twin carburetors, a higher compression ratio (7.5), and a higher redline, giving 35.5 hp at 7000 rpm and 27.5 lb-ft of torque at 6400 rpm. Also the transmission had a higher final drive ratio. Subaru claimed a 0-400 m time for this car of 20.6 seconds and a top speed of 120 km/h (about 75 mph).
If you look at GT2's power and torque ratings for the engine, they are clearly those of a Young SS, and the car's markings also match those of the Young SS. (It's easy to tell by looking at the white version, available on game days 10-19. Here's a real Young SS photo for comparison.)
Parnell Bone reviews the 360 on his site, so I'd like to respond to some of the statements he makes there. (Apologies if I come across as too literal sometimes; I know he's being funny here.)
First things first: the transmission.
Not with that gearing they didn't.
Here's GT2's gear ratios for the Subaru 360:
1st 3.130 / 2nd 1.601 / 3rd 1.000 / 4th 0.806
Final 3.883
The individual gear ratios are right. The problem is the final drive ratio. The Subaru 360 has two engine reduction gears in its drivetrain, and GT2 only includes the second one (which is the correct value for the Young SS). The primary reduction gear, which they missed, has a ratio of 1.605. By leaving this out, GT2 effectively robs the car of its real first gear and makes its fourth gear worthless. Instead GT2 should have used a final drive ratio of 3.883 times 1.605, or 6.232.
Unfortunately, GT2 has several cars where this problem exists. (Honda's Z Turbo is another example.) If the car had more than one engine reduction gear, GT2 only uses the ratio of one of them and leaves the others out.
I tried to replicate the real transmission using the Full Racing Transmission. GT2 won't let you set Final Drive higher than 5.500 for this car. To work around this, I had to fiddle. By setting Final Drive to 2.540 (I needed to use that, rather than 2.500, to get the exact gear ratios I wanted) and then setting Auto Setup to 11, I could set the gears as follows:
1st 3.547 / 2nd [omitted] / 3rd 1.814 / 4th 1.133 / 5th 0.913
Then I could reset Final Drive to 5.500, leaving Auto Setup alone. Multiplying these gear ratios by 5.500 gives the same values as multiplying the original gear ratios with 6.232, so they produce the same result.
I don't give a value for 2nd gear because the Full Racing Transmission forces me to have five gears, but I couldn't find a way to set four sequential gears to the right values. So I left 2nd gear as a "dummy gear". When testing straight-line acceleration, I'd set its ratio to as low a value as possible and use manual shifting, making it easier to shift directly from 1st to 3rd (which is the real car's 2nd). When testing lap times (using the Game Shark "autopilot" code), I'd set its ratio to as high a value as possible. Of course the computer would use it when starting, but only then; after the start it would never touch the dummy 2nd gear again, because the car would never be moving so slowly that the computer would downshift into the dummy gear.
(Incidentally, with this corrected transmission the car will hit the rev limiter in top gear at 84 mph.)
However, even correcting the transmission doesn't solve all the Subaru 360's performance problems in GT2.
Yeah, I know what you mean. The engine spin-up is ridiculously slow.
I'm pretty sure this is some sort of serious bug in GT2. All the cars with small engines seem to take too long to spin up, but the Subaru 360 is the worst by far. Its spin-up seems more like the spool-up of a heavy gas turbine than the acceleration of a tiny piston engine. Yeah, the engine has low torque, but it's also little. The Fiat 500's engine has roughly the same torque and is physically bigger, and it too has to drive an air-cooling fan, yet its spin-up is a good deal faster.
In fact, the Subaru 360's engine spin-up is so bad that it actually takes longer with the car held with the brake and the engine (presumably) in neutral than it does when accelerating the car in first gear. (This is with the corrected transmission I described above.) I did an experiment: in 1st gear, starting from idle, after the clutch has fully engaged at around 2600 rpm, it takes 4.8 seconds (game time) at full throttle to reach the automatic transmission's upshift point at around 7,500 rpm. With the brake held and engine disengaged, it takes 5.7 seconds at full throttle to spin up between those same points. This isn't just slow, it seems physically impossible.
You can sort of work around this by using a Racing Flywheel, but that's kind of a hack, and there seems to be a deeper power problem. Even though the car has the same weight as the Subaru 360 Young SS, and its power and torque values (after purchase) are about the same (the rpm values are slightly higher for the power peak and a good deal lower for the torque peak), the car is simply more sluggish than one with its ratio of weight to power should be. That ratio is better than that of many of the slower kei cars and other mini-cars. (Yes, I know peak power figures can be misleading, but I'm talking about the ratio for power averaged over the power band.)
Yet when I've used the Game Shark autopilot code to test the performance of GT2's Subaru 360 on various courses, by looking at the time for a flying lap (the lap after the starting lap), it is usually the second slowest car in the game. Even the Daihatsu Midget II usually does better, as long as it doesn't hit its rev limit, despite the fact that it has only 31 hp and is about a third again as heavy.
Something hidden in GT2's physics appears to be stealing the Subaru 360's power. The car's engine is an outlier in a couple of ways: it is by far the smallest in the game (360 cc, versus the Fiat 500's 600 cc), and it's the only two-stroke engine. Maybe this is related to the problem. Who knows?
Actually it was a big success in Japan. We're used to thinking of Japan as a rich developed country, but back in 1958, their economy was still quite weak and recovering from the war. Most Japanese still couldn't afford a car, instead using motorcycles or scooters for motor transportation. Kei cars were developed to help solve that problem, but it was only in the later 1950s that they got enough power to make them worthwhile. So when the Subaru 360 came out, it was a pretty big success, and Subaru ended up building something like 400,000 of them. Not the Fiat 500's level of popularity, sure, but still pretty healthy, and enough to get Subaru started as a serious car maker.
Of course, it was a dismal failure when exported to the U.S. in the late 1960s. That's no surprise. One has to wonder what Subaru was thinking, trying to sell a tiny kei car design to Americans at a time when many U.S. cars were practically friggin' land yachts and the U.S. car industry was deep in the muscle-car horsepower race. To be fair, it wasn't entirely their idea. The brainchild behind this scheme was Malcolm Bricklin, the same man who would later give Americans the Yugo!
Oh, just for laughs, here's a long U.S. TV commercial for the 360, a collection of short U.S. TV 360 ads, and a couple of Japanese TV ads for the Young SS.
Yeah, it's only a small motorcycle engine even by 1950s standards. But kei cars are all about having tiny bodies and engines. When the 360 was built, 360 cc was the limit for a kei car motor in either four-stroke or two-stroke form. In fact, Japan had only begun allowing kei cars to have two-strokes of that size in 1955, which was what finally let Japanese car makers produce kei cars that were practical. With a two-stroke, you could get more power and torque from that tiny displacement. Japan kept that 360 cc limit for kei cars until 1976.
Yes, it turns out they did. In particular, two Subaru 360s came in first and second in the T-1 class race (cars under 400 cc) of the second Japan Grand Prix at Suzuka on May 3, 1964.
(This is a long post. To summarize: GT2's Subaru 360 is actually the Young SS sport version, its transmission's final drive ratio is much too low, and there's some weird effect slowing down its engine spin-up. Also, even with the transmission fixed and ignoring engine spin-up, its track performance on flying laps is much slower than it should be based on its weight-to-power ratio, so there's something else slowing it down.)
First of all, I should clarify what version of the 360 this is. Though GT2 never mentions this (at least not in the North American version), its Subaru 360 is not the standard 1969 model but the Young SS sport model, the most powerful 360 version. That model was never exported from Japan. Its engine had twin carburetors, a higher compression ratio (7.5), and a higher redline, giving 35.5 hp at 7000 rpm and 27.5 lb-ft of torque at 6400 rpm. Also the transmission had a higher final drive ratio. Subaru claimed a 0-400 m time for this car of 20.6 seconds and a top speed of 120 km/h (about 75 mph).
If you look at GT2's power and torque ratings for the engine, they are clearly those of a Young SS, and the car's markings also match those of the Young SS. (It's easy to tell by looking at the white version, available on game days 10-19. Here's a real Young SS photo for comparison.)
Parnell Bone reviews the 360 on his site, so I'd like to respond to some of the statements he makes there. (Apologies if I come across as too literal sometimes; I know he's being funny here.)
First things first: the transmission.
Not with that gearing they didn't.
Here's GT2's gear ratios for the Subaru 360:
1st 3.130 / 2nd 1.601 / 3rd 1.000 / 4th 0.806
Final 3.883
The individual gear ratios are right. The problem is the final drive ratio. The Subaru 360 has two engine reduction gears in its drivetrain, and GT2 only includes the second one (which is the correct value for the Young SS). The primary reduction gear, which they missed, has a ratio of 1.605. By leaving this out, GT2 effectively robs the car of its real first gear and makes its fourth gear worthless. Instead GT2 should have used a final drive ratio of 3.883 times 1.605, or 6.232.
Unfortunately, GT2 has several cars where this problem exists. (Honda's Z Turbo is another example.) If the car had more than one engine reduction gear, GT2 only uses the ratio of one of them and leaves the others out.
I tried to replicate the real transmission using the Full Racing Transmission. GT2 won't let you set Final Drive higher than 5.500 for this car. To work around this, I had to fiddle. By setting Final Drive to 2.540 (I needed to use that, rather than 2.500, to get the exact gear ratios I wanted) and then setting Auto Setup to 11, I could set the gears as follows:
1st 3.547 / 2nd [omitted] / 3rd 1.814 / 4th 1.133 / 5th 0.913
Then I could reset Final Drive to 5.500, leaving Auto Setup alone. Multiplying these gear ratios by 5.500 gives the same values as multiplying the original gear ratios with 6.232, so they produce the same result.
I don't give a value for 2nd gear because the Full Racing Transmission forces me to have five gears, but I couldn't find a way to set four sequential gears to the right values. So I left 2nd gear as a "dummy gear". When testing straight-line acceleration, I'd set its ratio to as low a value as possible and use manual shifting, making it easier to shift directly from 1st to 3rd (which is the real car's 2nd). When testing lap times (using the Game Shark "autopilot" code), I'd set its ratio to as high a value as possible. Of course the computer would use it when starting, but only then; after the start it would never touch the dummy 2nd gear again, because the car would never be moving so slowly that the computer would downshift into the dummy gear.
(Incidentally, with this corrected transmission the car will hit the rev limiter in top gear at 84 mph.)
However, even correcting the transmission doesn't solve all the Subaru 360's performance problems in GT2.
Yeah, I know what you mean. The engine spin-up is ridiculously slow.
I'm pretty sure this is some sort of serious bug in GT2. All the cars with small engines seem to take too long to spin up, but the Subaru 360 is the worst by far. Its spin-up seems more like the spool-up of a heavy gas turbine than the acceleration of a tiny piston engine. Yeah, the engine has low torque, but it's also little. The Fiat 500's engine has roughly the same torque and is physically bigger, and it too has to drive an air-cooling fan, yet its spin-up is a good deal faster.
In fact, the Subaru 360's engine spin-up is so bad that it actually takes longer with the car held with the brake and the engine (presumably) in neutral than it does when accelerating the car in first gear. (This is with the corrected transmission I described above.) I did an experiment: in 1st gear, starting from idle, after the clutch has fully engaged at around 2600 rpm, it takes 4.8 seconds (game time) at full throttle to reach the automatic transmission's upshift point at around 7,500 rpm. With the brake held and engine disengaged, it takes 5.7 seconds at full throttle to spin up between those same points. This isn't just slow, it seems physically impossible.
You can sort of work around this by using a Racing Flywheel, but that's kind of a hack, and there seems to be a deeper power problem. Even though the car has the same weight as the Subaru 360 Young SS, and its power and torque values (after purchase) are about the same (the rpm values are slightly higher for the power peak and a good deal lower for the torque peak), the car is simply more sluggish than one with its ratio of weight to power should be. That ratio is better than that of many of the slower kei cars and other mini-cars. (Yes, I know peak power figures can be misleading, but I'm talking about the ratio for power averaged over the power band.)
Yet when I've used the Game Shark autopilot code to test the performance of GT2's Subaru 360 on various courses, by looking at the time for a flying lap (the lap after the starting lap), it is usually the second slowest car in the game. Even the Daihatsu Midget II usually does better, as long as it doesn't hit its rev limit, despite the fact that it has only 31 hp and is about a third again as heavy.
Something hidden in GT2's physics appears to be stealing the Subaru 360's power. The car's engine is an outlier in a couple of ways: it is by far the smallest in the game (360 cc, versus the Fiat 500's 600 cc), and it's the only two-stroke engine. Maybe this is related to the problem. Who knows?
Actually it was a big success in Japan. We're used to thinking of Japan as a rich developed country, but back in 1958, their economy was still quite weak and recovering from the war. Most Japanese still couldn't afford a car, instead using motorcycles or scooters for motor transportation. Kei cars were developed to help solve that problem, but it was only in the later 1950s that they got enough power to make them worthwhile. So when the Subaru 360 came out, it was a pretty big success, and Subaru ended up building something like 400,000 of them. Not the Fiat 500's level of popularity, sure, but still pretty healthy, and enough to get Subaru started as a serious car maker.
Of course, it was a dismal failure when exported to the U.S. in the late 1960s. That's no surprise. One has to wonder what Subaru was thinking, trying to sell a tiny kei car design to Americans at a time when many U.S. cars were practically friggin' land yachts and the U.S. car industry was deep in the muscle-car horsepower race. To be fair, it wasn't entirely their idea. The brainchild behind this scheme was Malcolm Bricklin, the same man who would later give Americans the Yugo!
Oh, just for laughs, here's a long U.S. TV commercial for the 360, a collection of short U.S. TV 360 ads, and a couple of Japanese TV ads for the Young SS.
Yeah, it's only a small motorcycle engine even by 1950s standards. But kei cars are all about having tiny bodies and engines. When the 360 was built, 360 cc was the limit for a kei car motor in either four-stroke or two-stroke form. In fact, Japan had only begun allowing kei cars to have two-strokes of that size in 1955, which was what finally let Japanese car makers produce kei cars that were practical. With a two-stroke, you could get more power and torque from that tiny displacement. Japan kept that 360 cc limit for kei cars until 1976.
Yes, it turns out they did. In particular, two Subaru 360s came in first and second in the T-1 class race (cars under 400 cc) of the second Japan Grand Prix at Suzuka on May 3, 1964.
I'm just joking. You obviously know your **** here. 
