The Subaru Sambar Is a Cute, Surprisingly Practical Tiny Van

this is a 1991 subaru sandbar and it's a van not much of a van as you can see this is approximately the same size as a barbecue grill but it is a van a tiny little japanese market van that's been imported to the united states and today i'm going to review it [Music] this sam bar is brought to me by a viewer in northern california who has since converted it into a 1990s themed photo booth on wheels and it's available for events there are pogs for business cards there's 90s flair all over and there's even a working super nintendo in the back that you can play it's hilariously cool and available for most any event you can think of check it out at themicromachine.com and follow along with it on instagram at micro machine photo booth so let's talk sambar this is a k car which is a japanese car size classification that provides certain benefits to incredibly tiny vehicles that don't take up much space in big cities now most k cars are little hatchbacks but this one is a little van and i mean little because this is about three feet shorter in length than a mini cooper this has a little four-cylinder engine that makes about 45 horsepower and it also has four-wheel drive and even though this van is about 30 years old a newer model of this still exists in subaru's lineup today and today i'm going to review this sandbar first i'll show you all the quirks and features of the tiniest van you'll ever see then i'll get it out on the road and drive it and then i'll give it a dug score all right i'm going to start the quirks and features of the same bar by discussing its then starting with the doors it has sliding doors on both sides driver and passenger sliding doors and they open right up to get you into the interior dual sliding doors is a big deal especially for the early 90s american vans didn't really have dual sliding doors until years later and this tiny little sandbar had it by 91 but when you climb inside the sandbar you quickly realize that comparing it to american vans isn't really a fair fight because this doesn't have anywhere near as many seats only two seats in back in the sandbar no three rows back here no eight person seating capacity you only get four total seats so this isn't exactly a family soccer practice hauler still four seats and a cargo area is a pretty cool thing most of these k-cars were tiny little hatchbacks that barely had any interior room because the k-car size class is very restrictive this van maximizes its space in some really clever ways which i will show you and by the way although this sandbar is currently in a passenger configuration it doesn't have to be you can see these rear seats are just mounted on a platform which is easily removable you could take them out and then use this as a cargo van and you'd really have a lot of space for cargo at least considering this vehicle's size these sandbar models were also offered as a pickup truck with only two front seats and then a bed back here and that's why the fuel door is mounted here kind of right behind the front door under the seats because there were some of these that were sold without any bodywork behind the front doors and so there was no other place to mount the fuel door if you got the pickup truck version so there were several different options when it came to the sandbar and its configurations but anyway like i said this sandbar is equipped for passengers and as such it has some nice luxuries back here for instance the windows in the back seats rolled down which is a pretty cool touch again american minivans in the late 80s early 90s they didn't have roll down windows in the back but this van did it was ahead of the curve and you also have cup holders back here which is a nice touch as well somewhere for your kids to stick their drinks while they're being driven around in early 90s japan you also have this little storage cubby which is a nice luxury touch i suppose and maybe most importantly you have a rear heater you can see the vents here to blow warm air to the rear passengers and warm them up on cold days now interestingly this rear heater doesn't really have any controls only this switch here mounted on the back of the front center console and it only works on or off you can't adjust the temperature or the amount of heat none of that stuff you can just choose between on or off but hey at least it's got something to improve the comfort of the rear passengers now despite those wonderful luxuries to improve the comfort of the rear passengers in this van you don't have seat belts i i don't mean they're not on this one i mean they don't exist there's no mounting place for them there's no seat belts at all in the back seat of this van so even though you had roll down windows and a rear heater and cup holders they knew people be riding back here they didn't see that it was important to have them built it in it was a different era but with that said the seats do have one very very cool feature that goes back to the clever use of space in this interior that i mentioned earlier and that is they can fold down and i don't just mean you can fold them down for more cargo space i mean you can fold the rear seats back as you can see here and then you can fold the front seat back as well and it perfectly aligns with the base of the rear seat which gives you a bed a lie flat bed in this van you can do the same thing over on the other side as well so really you can have two kind of full length beds in here that you can lie down on which is pretty cool especially in a van this size american van lifers spend tens of thousands of dollars to get beds into their sprinter vans this tiny little old japanese van came with it from the factory which is a pretty cool and clever use of space and neat trick with the seats but anyway next up as clever as it is to have the fold flat seats that turn into a bed this van has an even cleverer trick in back for one thing the cargo area is huge massive really especially considering the tiny size of this vehicle this cargo area is larger than in some modern crossovers that are way way bigger but the clever part is under the cargo floor you lift up the carpet you can see this little trap door here open this and it gives you access to the engine that's right the engine has been hidden out of place underneath the cargo area in order to maximize interior room and check this out if you need to access the engine more than just through that trap door well open up the hood this little latch here releases the hood you fold down the bumper and that gives you access to the rest of the engine its components yes that's right the hood of the subaru sandbar is the rear bumper and it really does operate like a hood you open it up or push it down whatever and you can see the oil cap there your dipstick here just like you'd find in your engine bay and you even have the valve cover this is your actual engine located under the hood which just happens to be your rear bumper this is again a really really clever packaging solution again getting the engine out of the way so it doesn't take up interior room but also giving you the best access possible and doubling up the bumper as the engine cover it really is brilliant to get as much space as you can in this van but next i want to go back to that engine cover the valve cover you can see it proudly announces that this is the subaru clover iv and there's even an image of a clover on it frankly i wouldn't be so proud if i was subaru this van had about 45 horsepower from the factory this is a 660cc four cylinder incredibly tiny although i should be fair to this van there was a supercharged version available with more power although the supercharger only added nine horsepower that brought you up to like 54 horses to make for a real excitement machine and by the way another piece of really clever packaging around back you can see with the tailgate up there's a little cap over here on the left that's your washer fluid and you also have a cap over on the right that's coolant you add coolant or washer fluid in these areas and it goes like through the pillar behind the brake lights and it gets where it needs to go again tremendously clever to integrate that stuff there to keep it out of the way and maximize interior space and by the way next up before i move up front inside i do want to point out one other important detail back here this is not just a subaru sandbar no this is a sambar super deluxe as you can see with this badge back here because no japanese car from this era could ever just be make and model there also had to be some bizarre trim level associated with it like super deluxe and interestingly that isn't the only trim level of this van you go into the interior look at the seats and you can see they say dyess or maybe dies i'm not sure how it'd be pronounced but that's also this van's trim level so is it a dias or a super deluxe well apparently it's both and that distinction is meaningless now 30 years later who knows what got you what and next up we move up front in the sandbar and i have to say this van is roomier than i expected up here now it's not huge you can see my knees are kind of up against the steering wheel but for a vehicle that's only 120 some inches long three feet shorter than a mini cooper you have pretty decent space up here and i already showed you decent space in the back seat and decent cargo space too again excellent packaging in here and that's mostly because there's no engine in front the japanese k-car restrictions restrict vehicles in part based on length and if you can get that giant hood and engine area out of the front then you can really expand the passenger area although that probably comes at the detriment of crash safety you can see i'm sitting here basically at the very front of this vehicle and so if we're in an accident i am the crumple zone in the sandbar now few interesting things up here for one like i mentioned earlier this van has four wheel drive not permanent but it's pretty easy to access if you wanted you can press this button at the top of the gear lever marked 4wd and that turns on the four wheel drive system this van or you can push the gear lever up and to the left now regular up and to the left is just first gear but if you push it further over and then up that activates a crawler gear which you can see is labeled as el that stands for extra low and it's like a low range crawler gear that you can use to get out of tough situations when you shift it into el four-wheel drive instantly turns on which allows you to crawl forward with all your wheels turning pretty nice now interestingly this van does have some other nice creature comforts including air conditioning not just heat up here you can see actual air conditioning which is uncommon in japanese vehicles this era doesn't get that hot in japan for that long it's a tiny little vehicle they didn't often include air conditioning on k cars but this van has it and this van also has a lot of storage up front you can see a glove box here you open it up not very big and there's stereo equipment in there which i find hilarious imagine someone rocking out in their sandbar in 1990s japan but anyway you do have a glove box below that you have this little storage cubby where you can stick stuff and above the glove box you have another little storage cubby where you can stick stuff and above the climate vents in the center you have another little storage cubby where you can stick stuff so there's a good amount of in cabin interior storage for the small items that you don't want to stick in the cargo area now the other cool thing about the sandbar from a driver and passengers perspective is the sunroofs this van has two sunroofs which was pretty cool for a little k van the first one is directly over the front seats and it's sort of like a normal sized sunroof you can have the glass part open to see the sun or you can manually open it to get a little more air in here but the really cool sunroof is the one over the back seats interestingly subaru calls this the sun sunroof not just sunroof but sun sun roof so there's the regular sunroof and then the sun sunroof apparently but anyway it's this massive sunroof over the rear seats now this giant sunroof does open it's a huge panoramic sunroof that slides back automatically on these tracks but in this particular sandbar it doesn't work particularly well so i'm not going to open it but these vans did come with a big panoramic sunroof so everyone could enjoy the open air but no seat belts got a big sunroof instead of seat belts now you can see this rear sunroof also has a giant sun shade to close it in case you don't want the sun to come in and the front sunroof also has a sunshade this one is in like multiple levels because it had to fit into this front storage compartment since the sun sunroof took up the space in the rear but that means that if you want to close yourself from the sun you can do that also in the sandbar all right driving the sandbar i've always wanted to check out one of these vans i think they are incredibly cute incredibly cool looking and for all the people who have delicas out there if you don't want a delica that's like the four wheel drive van that's really hot to import right now if you don't want something that large not that those are even big here's like a city friendly delica four-wheel drive you can still get a bed in here the seats become a bet so thoughts on this van couple things uh the owner has brought this fan out to me about an hour and a half from where he lives and he had to take it on the highway to do that and he said it's a disaster on the highway he said 60 is miles an hour is like the absolute top of the world for this van and you don't want to be going that speed for too long not only is it loud and crashing incredibly small and small tires that aren't great for highways but he also said the radiator is mounted under the vehicle and it just takes air from underneath it's not like getting a ton of air to it it wasn't really designed for like freeway travel in the united states this was a city van the k cars are city vehicles and so they didn't really have to think about like high-speed cruising until americans started importing them and then wondering why they couldn't go on the highway couple cool things about this van for one visibility is absolutely fantastic as you can see in this image there's just windows everywhere you can see everything and because the van is so relatively small you know exactly where every part of it is at any given moment now i am a little anxious about you know crash safety because i am the crash safety of this van but it was also true of volkswagen vanguard volkswagen bus a lot of vans like this the delica previa to an extent and so it wasn't unusual to the sandbar it's just this one is even smaller than the other vans and thus you are even more likely to be killed it actually feels reasonably peppy now i make fun of the engine power in this car but all the k cars were about this power and that was part of the k car restriction you were restricted to a certain ccs and roughly you were restricted to a certain amount of power and so most of these k cars were very underpowered little things but they were also really small like i said this is like 128 inches long i mean it's nothing it's incredibly tiny and so you didn't need a lot of power especially since these were only really going to be used in tight japanese cities to drive around you know 40 was the max you'd ever be driving this based on how people used these these k vans now it's a shame that the sun sunroof isn't working because frankly i could see it being a real experience in this van with the giant with the roof basically open you're driving like a convertible little van which would be kind of funny um in terms of driving experience like i mentioned performance the steering and handling is more eager than i expected the van body rolls less than i expected but still it's not really exactly a performance vehicle it just sort of does what you ask uncomplainingly but it doesn't make it particularly exciting although it is a little tighter and quicker to steer than i thought probably just a function of its incredibly small size now here i am in third going up a hill i'm flooring it and i am losing speed and it is not much of a hill which kind of speaks to this vehicle's uh performance and acceleration capabilities truthfully this is a fun little van and i'm thrilled that i get to check it out before it became a photo booth um it's a neat little vehicle that is kind of fun to bomb around in and if you i could actually see a use for this if you lived in certain cities in the states northern climates uh where they get some snow but you don't really want a giant vehicle well here's your opportunity it's a good little zippy around town van if for some reason you need four wheel drive and camping capabilities in a van in the city it's it's a cute little car these are starting to come over to the states in larger numbers they're practical vehicles for use on like college campuses or around town delivery that sort of thing uh and it's a fun little practical van and they're relatively cheap to buy and import and they have four-wheel drive kind of cool and so that's the subaru sambar this isn't particularly practical for life in north america but it is a quirky and interesting little van and i've always wanted to check it out and i'm thrilled that i had the chance to review this one before it became the micro machine photo booth anyway now it's time to give the sambar a doug score and the dug score is here 39 out of 100 which places the same bar here against some other unusual and sort of similar vehicles i've reviewed this is a quirky little van and it works perfectly in japan good practicality in a small package in the states it makes a little less sense it's cramped and underpowered for all but the most densely populated cities still it's cool to check out the sandbar and see this quirky k-car van [Music]

Channel: Doug DeMuro

Views: 1,902,574

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Id: yyTJTUNgsVU

Length: 18min 10sec (1090 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 24 2022