Subaru has never sold a production motorcycle, but its flat engines and rally image keep dragging the brand into two-wheeled experiments anyway. Independent builders have squeezed Subaru powertrains into custom bikes and even turned old sedans into lake-going curiosities, blurring the line between stunt machine and backyard boat. The result is a strange little subculture where a company that officially sticks to cars keeps inspiring people to bolt its hardware into anything that floats or rolls.
How a WRX engine ended up between two wheels
The cleanest expression of this obsession is a one-off machine nicknamed The Madboxer, a custom motorcycle built around a Subaru WRX engine. The project did not come from Subaru, and there was no corporate stunt brief, just a fabricator who decided that a turbocharged flat four belonged in a bike frame and then refused to back down from the engineering headache that followed. At the heart of the build sits the WRX powerplant, a layout that normally lives in a compact sedan but here dominates the visual and mechanical center of the bike, turning the whole machine into a rolling tribute to Subaru’s boxer heritage.
The builder’s approach was methodical rather than theatrical. Once he had the motor block and wheels roughly mocked up, he started creating detailed renderings of the center steer hub, swing arms and the main chassis sides to make the geometry work around the bulky engine, a process described in depth in coverage of the Madboxer. The finished bike uses an automatic-style setup, with no gear lever on the foot pegs and instead a button on the handlebars to change gears, a layout that lines up with other “automatic” motorcycles and is detailed in reports on the car-engine motorcycle. With no flywheel, the engine is described as brutally responsive, demanding serious attention from the rider just to stay on the bike, a trait highlighted in coverage of The Madboxer itself.
The brand that will not build a bike, and the fans who will not wait
Officially, Subaru has never manufactured or sold branded motorcycles, and there is no evidence in the record that the company has ever run a motorcycle-only stunt program that accidentally produced a boat. Guides that track rumors and concepts are explicit that Subaru has not put its name on a two-wheeled product, and that all such machines are custom builds or speculative ideas, a point spelled out in detail in a buyer’s guide on Subaru motorcycles. That same analysis notes that the flat four boxer configuration that defines Subaru’s identity in cars presents significant engineering challenges when someone tries to hang it in a motorcycle frame, which helps explain why the Madboxer remains a one-off curiosity rather than a template for a showroom line.
Subaru’s reluctance to chase every niche is not new. When the company wanted to tap into the SUV boom, it did not start from a clean sheet, it took an existing Impreza platform and raised it into what became the Forester, a move described as a cost-conscious way to enter the “smoking hot” SUV sector. That same pragmatism shows up in motorsport, where the brand leans on rally and gymkhana rather than factory-built motorcycles to project its adventurous image. The long-running series Subaru Launch Control follows Subaru Motorsports USA through stage rallies and stunt projects, while social clips invite fans to “shake the cobwebs off” and Watch Road to Gymkhana: Part 1, reinforcing that the company’s official playground is still four wheels at a time.
From lake-going Impreza to stunt royalty
The boat part of this story also lives firmly in fan territory, not in Subaru’s product plans. In New Zealand, a group of friends converted a Subaru Impreza into an amphibious vehicle that could drive into a lake and putter around on the surface, an experiment that later saw the same crew fishing from a caravan on Lake Tarawera. Reports on the Subaru Impreza conversion describe how the car was adapted to run on water and how little fuel it used while afloat, turning a humble compact into a kind of DIY boat. It was a stunt in the loose, backyard sense of the word, but there is no indication that Subaru commissioned it, and no link between that amphibious project and any motorcycle build.
That gap between official strategy and fan creativity is where the headline’s tension really lives. Subaru pours its marketing energy into rally heroes and stunt drivers, from long-form series to collaborations with athletes like Travis Pastrana, whose career spans motocross, rally and even a stint in Monster Jam driving a truck named “Pastrana 199.” Clips from Subaru Motorsports USA show Pastrana sliding rally cars through gymkhana courses while captions casually tag Gymkhana and Part numbers, but the machines stay resolutely four-wheeled. The motorcycle powered by a WRX engine and the Impreza that learned to swim are both the work of outsiders who love the brand enough to ignore its boundaries, not evidence of a secret Subaru program that set out to build a bike and accidentally launched a boat.
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