The biggest car news and reviews, no BS
Our free daily newsletter sends the stories that really matter directly to you, every weekday.
Look back about 12 months, and Subaru WRX sales were not in an enviable spot. 2025 marked the model’s worst-performing trip around the sun ever, though it wasn’t necessarily a byproduct of lagging demand. The WRX suffered as a casualty of Subaru’s manufacturing musical chairs over the last few years, when the new Forester supplanted it in production-line priority. While unfortunate, the move made sense from a business perspective, given that the SUV is a major sales driver for the small automaker.
But that’s in the past now, and since inventory for the sport sedan has recovered, and its base model is back on the menu, the WRX has enjoyed a much more comfortable end to the summer. 191% more comfortable, to be precise.
The WRX closed out August with almost three times the sales it pulled over the same month in 2025—1,778 cars, versus 611. Pack that into the year to date, and the WRX is selling 37.7% better than it was entering September 2025, having already reached 10,324 units sold. That’s just around 600 cars shy of 2025’s total, so the rally-bred sedan is all but certain to outperform last year’s historic low.
Of course, we’re happy to see it. It would seem that Subaru pulled the base WRX because it knew it had to make every sale count, so to speak, over a lengthy period when inventory would be constrained. The base version returned in January at $32,495, about $5,000 cheaper than the six-speed Premium, which was the lowest rung on the WRX ladder last year.
Today, the base WRX has more equipment than ever, though Subaru’s lack of meaningful performance updates beyond better brakes and suspension for higher-end packages like the TR and tS have left the current car feeling a bit long in the tooth. Meanwhile, a limited-slip differential still isn’t an option at any level, and every WRX still rolls off the line with the same 271-horsepower, 2.4-liter turbocharged boxer-four. We want to believe that the special models STI teased in Japan earlier this year will finally surprise us, but we’ve been burned so many times before.
Got a tip? Reach out to tips@thedrive.com
Backed by a decade of covering cars and consumer tech, Adam Ismail is a Senior Editor at The Drive, focused on curating and producing the site’s slate of daily stories.
