Subaru built exactly 424 units of the 22B STI in 1998: 400 for the Japanese domestic market, 21 more split between Australia and the UK, and three prototypes that never reached a customer at all. When one of the 400 Japan-market cars finally came up for public auction in the United States in April 2021, wearing about 25,000 miles, it sold for $317,555 with fees — the first time this specific homologation special had ever traded at a public American sale.
Where the 424 Number Actually Comes From
The 22B wasn’t built to satisfy dealer demand — it existed to commemorate Subaru’s third consecutive World Rally Championship manufacturers’ title and to homologate a widened body and larger-displacement flat-four for competition use. According to Hagerty’s own reporting on the car’s first U.S. public auction, Subaru capped the run at 400 Japanese-market cars, sold out in Japan within days of the order books opening, plus a small additional allocation of 21 cars for Australia and the UK combined and three engineering prototypes that were never sold. A separately documented breakdown puts that export allocation at 16 units for the UK and 5 for Australia — 21 combined, matching Hagerty’s number exactly — a level of agreement across independent sources that’s rare for a 1998 production run this small. That total of 424 has become the commonly cited production figure across enthusiast and collector circles, and it holds up because it traces directly back to a documented, individually numbered production run rather than a rounded estimate — the car that sold in 2021 was specifically identified as chassis number 156 of the 400 Japan cars.
What Made It Different From a Regular STI
Subaru didn’t just badge a regular Impreza and call it special. The 22B carried the EJ22G, a bored-out 2.2-liter flat-four displacing 2,212cc in place of the standard car’s 2.0-liter unit, plus wider fender flares pulled from the Peter Stevens-designed WRC car to cover a track widened by roughly 3.15 inches (80mm) overall, a hand-finished engine bay, and a numbered plaque on the center console for every Japanese-market example. It was, in effect, Subaru’s version of what Nissan was doing with the Skyline GT-R around the same era: take the road car about as far from showroom-normal as regulations allowed, then sell just enough of them to qualify for competition and let scarcity do the rest of the marketing.
What One Actually Costs Today
The $317,555 result from that first U.S. public sale isn’t an outlier anymore — it’s closer to a floor. With only 424 units in existence worldwide and a car culture that has spent the past decade rediscovering late-1990s Japanese performance cars, values for the 22B have effectively been on a one-way trajectory since that first sale broke the ice for U.S. buyers. Unlike more common STI variants that still trade for real-world used-car money, a 22B in any condition is now firmly a six-figure proposition, and a genuinely low-mile, unmodified example with clean provenance can push well past that original $317,555 benchmark. There is functionally no “cheap” 22B left to find — the rarity that made it special in 1998 is the same rarity now setting its price a quarter-century later.
Compare That to a Regular STI
The gap between the 22B and its more common siblings is the clearest illustration of how much scarcity alone is worth in this market. A well-kept, standard STI from the same era can still be found for a fraction of six figures, sometimes for less than the price of a new economy car, because Subaru built tens of thousands of them across multiple markets and years. The 22B shares an engine family and a general silhouette with those cars, but almost nothing else about its ownership experience — the Japanese allocation reportedly sold out within a window of 30 minutes to 48 hours of order books opening, and that same scarcity now separates its resale value from a garden-variety STI by roughly an order of magnitude.
Why Rarity Alone Isn’t the Whole Story
Plenty of limited-run cars from the same era never became six-figure legends, which is worth remembering before treating “only 424 built” as the sole explanation. The 22B’s value rests just as much on what it represents — the literal physical evidence of Subaru’s WRC dominance, built in a production run small enough that most enthusiasts who wanted one in period never got the chance. Scarcity created the ceiling; the car’s connection to an actual, verifiable competition legacy is what gave buyers a reason to pay up to it.
The Takeaway
A production run of 424 cars sounds small until you consider how many people around the world now want one, and that mismatch between a fixed, unrepeatable supply and a steadily growing pool of buyers with real money is exactly the mechanism turning a late-1990s rally homologation special into one of the most expensive Subarus that has ever existed.