Skip to main content

Subaru’s first — and smallest — car just made history in Japan

The WRX, the Outback, and the Forester all trace their roots back to the 360, a tiny rear-engined car manufactured in Japan well before Subaru became a household name all around the world. Recognizing its importance, the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers (JSME) has just designated Subaru’s first mass-produced car a mechanical engineering heritage item.

The term “heritage item” is more than just a vague, boilerplate title. It means that the 360 is now considered a part of Japan’s cultural heritage, and its careful preservation is encouraged so that it can be passed on to future generations. The 360 is the first Subaru — and only the second car — to earn this prestigious designation.

Recommended Videos

A little bit of background information is required here. The 360 was introduced in its home country in 1958, and it was briefly sold in the United States during the late 1960s. It carried a base price of $1,297 in 1968, its first year on the market, but sales were low at best and Subaru quickly realized the car was far too small and slow to suit the tastes of American consumers. A bigger, more spacious model named FF-1 Star powered by a flat-four engine was introduced in 1970, inaugurating a mechanical layout that continues to characterize members of the Subaru lineup to this day.

The story was different in Japan, where motorists had a seemingly insatiable appetite for small, affordable, and efficient cars. The 360 fit the bill perfectly. It stretched only 117 inches long, it tipped the scale at about 900 pounds, and it used a 356cc two-cylinder air-cooled engine rated at just 25 horsepower. With its sheer simplicity, it helped an entire generation make the transition from a bike or a motorcycle to a car; it’s easy to see why it’s considered part of Japan’s heritage.

Read more: Subaru’s 2017 Impreza is sharper, more dynamic to drive, and safer than ever

The other car on the list of mechanical heritage items is an obscure electric model named Tama that was built in the late 1940s in response to a widespread oil shortage in post-war Japan. Other items related to the automotive industry include Honda’s CVCC engine, the first automatic transmission developed in Japan, and Mazda’s 10A rotary engine.

Ronan Glon
Ronan Glon is an American automotive and tech journalist based in southern France. As a long-time contributor to Digital…
The worst health care data breach in history just got worse
A hacker typing on an Apple MacBook laptop while holding a phone. Both devices show code on their screens.

Change Healthcare, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth, initially reported a data breach in October last year that was considered the worst in the industry. The breach, which affected up to 100 million users, has now grown to an alarming 190 million, according to Tech Crunch. Cybercriminals reportedly exploited an employee system that lacked multi-factor authentication.

UnitedHealth confirmed the new numbers for the ransomware attack on Friday. “Change Healthcare has determined the estimated total number of individuals impacted by the Change Healthcare cyberattack is approximately 190 million,” Tyler Mason, a spokesperson for UnitedHealth Group, wrote in an email to TechCrunch.

Read more
Tesla finally made an app that turns your Apple Watch into a car key
Tesla app on the Apple Watch.

It was all the way back in March that Tesla chief Elon Musk hinted that an Apple Watch integration for Tesla’s electric cars was plausible. A few quarters past Musk’s social media comment, code sleuths spotted a watch reference within the Tesla app.

Today, Tesla confirmed that an official Apple Watch app is coming soon. As part of the 2024 Tesla Holiday Update, the carmaker will officially release a watchOS version of the Tesla app. It will start arriving as part of an over-the-air (OTA) update that starts rolling out next week.

Read more
We just got our first hint of the RTX 6090, but it’s not what you think
A hand grabbing MSI's RTX 4090 Suprim X.

As we're all counting down the days to a possible announcement of Nvidia's RTX 50-series, GPU brands are already looking ahead to what comes next. A new trademark filing with the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) reveals just how far ahead some manufacturers are thinking, because it mentions not just the Nvidia RTX 5090, but also an RTX 5090 Ti; there's even an RTX 6090 Ti. Still, it'll be a long while before we can count the RTX 60-series among the best graphics cards, so what is this all about?

The trademark registration filing, first spotted by harukaze5719 on X (formerly Twitter) and shared by VideoCardz, comes from a company called Sinotex International Industrial Ltd. This company is responsible for the GPU brand Ninja, which doesn't have much of a market presence in the U.S.

Read more