Subaru Teases a New WRX with the Old STI’s Manual Transmission

Vik is the Co-Founder and former Editor at MotorAuthority, a leading U. S. website covering performance and luxury cars. Since 2025, he has contributed to CarBuzz, blending his engineering background and almost 20 years of automotive journalism experience to deliver cutting-edge news and analysis. Subaru of Japan has kicked off a teaser campaign for what it describes as a new WRX with a manual transmission. The automaker has released a single photo and described the car as carrying the WRX legacy into the next era. What all of this means remains unclear, but Subaru has scheduled the reveal for November, so we won't have long to wait for answers.

The heavy-duty TY85 six-speed manual has been revived for a mass-produced WRX version in Japan. Japanese enthusiasts craving a manual transmission in the latest generation of the Subaru WRX were left with the limited-production WRX STI Sport♯, which was only available for 600 lucky buyers through a lottery system. However, the automaker is finally answering their calls for 2027, announcing that a manual WRX will join the standard-production catalog as a permanent model.

Back in the day, we used to regularly conduct “Cheap Speed” comparison tests of all the available sport compacts. In a 2009 version of this test, we gathered seven speedy compact cars for around $25,000. The Subaru WRX and the Volkswagen GTI were among the mainstays of this segment, and they’re still going strong today. But they don’t cost $25,000 anymore. Even so, Subaru and Volkswagen have worked admirably to keep these high-performance machines within a reasonably affordable price envelope. Here, we’ve brought together the base models of both cars to see whether they can still deliver on the same price-to-performance ratio that made them such legends in the first place. What We TestedIn the case of the WRX, the base model only recently returned to the lineup for 2026. With a starting price of $33,690, it does without some niceties but has the same all-wheel-drive system, 271-hp turbocharged flat-four, and six-speed manual transmission you’ll find in more expensive models. In GTI-speak, S means base model, and it’s a bit more expensive than the WRX to start.

There are very few cars that are as closely associated with affordable mass-motoring as the original Volkswagen Beetle. The famously rear-engine, rear-wheel-drive Type 1, as it was known internally, entered series production way back in 1945. No fewer than 21.5 million units later, production finally wrapped up in 2003. Despite enjoying a near-60-year-long career, the Beetle's underpinnings went through very little in the way of revolution over that time. The air-cooled flat-four engine remained rear-mounted for the entirety of production, although Volkswagen did experiment with at least one water-cooled prototype, and the recipe was tweaked as the years marched on.

The dumb oil war in Iran is driving up the cost of just about everything, including new cars. That’s giving Chinese EVs a huge advantage over Western “legacy” car brands already lagging in tech and struggling with affordability – and those legacy brands about to have a whole new to them problem on their hands: USED Chinese EVs. Western automakers have leaned on protectionist trade policies to keep cheaper Chinese rivals at bay, placing strict limits on the number of new Chinese cars allowed in and hefty tariffs on new battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) are as high as 45.3% in the EU. That supply limitation is, of course, ratcheting up demand for the high-tech, low-cost Chinese machines, and buyers in Europe and Canada are finding that used Chinese EVs – which offer comparable tech to the newest Western EVs, a price tag up to 40% lower than their already low MSRPs, and which are not subject to the same protectionist import duties – are a workable alternative.

The five second rule doesn't apply in this case If you're not already using microfiber towels to dry or clean your car, you should start. They're not only much softer and more absorbent than traditional sponges, but also readily available, inexpensive, and effective for drying paint, cleaning windows, and detailing interiors. However, they require care, and if they get dirty, you'd be wise to retire them.