Import controversy
The verdict that nearly killed Subaru's US debut.
Subaru's first car in America weighed less than a thousand pounds and slipped clean under the safety laws of its day. Then, in April 1969, Consumer Reports tested it and reached for a verdict it almost never used: Not Acceptable. What came next nearly ended the brand's American story before it started — though the single most-quoted line about it is one we still can't confirm.
Too light to regulate
The 360's trick was its own featherweight: under a thousand pounds, which dropped it below the threshold that triggered the era's new federal motor-vehicle safety standards. Importer Malcolm Bricklin reportedly didn't hide that exemption — he leaned into it as a selling point. Which meant that when the verdict finally came, the car had further to fall: it hadn't just failed a test, it had been marketed on not having to take one.
What the testers reported
The cited findings read like a list of small betrayals. In a crash against a full-size American car, the bumper reportedly pushed back into the passenger compartment. Lap belts that loosened as you wore them. Front seats that could slide forward on their own. And roughly 37 seconds from 0 to 50 mph — not a spec so much as a warning about merging into American traffic that simply wasn't going to wait.
The line that isn't actually in there
Retelling after retelling attributes a "most dangerous car in America" characterization to that review — and it's the kind of phrase a story wants to be true. This project has now read the primary April 1969 text in full, three pages, start to finish. The phrase simply isn't there. Not softened, not paraphrased elsewhere on the page — absent. It's a line later retellings added to each other, copying the embellishment forward until it read like a quote. One more thing worth keeping straight: this is a US-import story, not a referendum on the car. The 360 kept selling in Japan through 1971, roughly 392,000 built across its life. It failed a magazine, and a market — not physics.