The sudden faux-rally-car trend / and how car companies can use it for marketing?

Seems like there's a lot of threads on this and other forums about "rally" and "safari" this and that, which seem to be pretty much primarily cosmetic stuff or spring spacers + all-terrain tires. Not that it's new - Subaru guys (disclaimer, former WRX owner here) have been doing that for years. 

But I was thinking about it today when I was walking through the garage at work today and come upon a new WRX with mudflaps, big Hella lights, and the plate "RALY WRX" or something like that. As I glanced over at it, the (likely military guy) who owns it walks around the corner and and unprompted tells me how he "built it to rally" - and how he has seem my WRX (which I sold like 8 months ago, but whatever - this explains who kept leaving the "Subaru DRIVE" magazines on my windshield once a month, lol). Then told me I should "build mine to rally" as well. I'm trying to keep a straight face and I tell him "well, I actually do rally." The response "The WRX, or do you have an STi too?"

At that point I'm kind of wandering away toward my decidedly non-rally commuter GTI (ugh, with rally armor mudflaps....) and say "nah, just an old BMW" to which he says "oh, that's cool, when are you gonna build the Subaru??"

I suppose this is probably the kind of thing I'd say when I was 20, knowing little about actual rally back then. But I never had a cool enough car back then to pretend it was a rally car :) I do think it's interesting that Subaru has done such a great job marketing, that the general populace literally doesn't associate anything else with rally other than Subarus (and no, most of the "General populace" has no clue who Ken Block is or what Hoonigan is, etc).

Makes we wonder if other manufacturers could tap into the whole "rally cool-factor" thing better to sell cars, especailly lower-priced cars. Honda had a Passport, Fit, and CR-Z competing in last weekend's Ohio Forest Rally, which was pretty cool. They are built by the Honda R&D team, but I'm curious to see if Honda can (or will) translate that into some marketing - especially since the Passport actually did really well (top-10, or close to it).  Will we see a real Civic Type R rally car (perhaps supported by Honda itself)? Or will we just see the fake bro'd out "Rally Style" ones like in the other recent photo? 

With all of its rally heritage (and plenty of Fiesta R5's running in the US), doesn't seem Ford has used it at all for marketing (I suppose since Ford is discontinuing all those cars in the US anyhow....). 

All rhetorical observations. Obviously, BMW would probable prefer none of us rally e30s and e36 for fear that someone might think they're BMWs :)

I have nothing to add other than the fact that Wyatt Knox has a YouTube series debating on May 30th entitled "Will it rally?" the trailer features a Chevy Astro sliding sideways in the snow. I can't wait to view it. 

Not a lot of that in my town but I am planning on putting rally armor mudflaps on the ms6 and I'm dreading the rally comments and questions. Truth is I work at a brickyard with dirt/crushed brick/mud roads & parking lots. The mudflaps are a good way to not need to wash my car every other day. 

Am i part of the problem by putting rally armor mudflaps on the daily drivers to keep E36 M3 off the rockers? The universal ones are 25 shipped from amazon....

Maybe it's a regional thing, I don't think I've seen any cars like that in my area.

You’re talking about subsets of subsets of marketing segments for manufacturers. 

captdownshift said:

I have nothing to add other than the fact that Wyatt Knox has a YouTube series debating on May 30th entitled "Will it rally?" the trailer features a Chevy Astro sliding sideways in the snow. I can't wait to view it. 

I might know a bit about that Astro, lol...it was our service rig at SOFR last weekend (owned by Dan Downey, who rallies an e30). And let me tell you, it is a complete pile. I would not feel particularly safe driving it even on a regular road, lol. So much so that we moved all the gear over into my Sequoia and used it instead for service. It's an AWD Astro, and Dan has plenty of vids of him hooning it around Team O'Neal Rally School, where he works . He twoed the rally car 14 hours from NH ot OHio in it and only broke down once, though.....

also here ....as you can see, we switched the trailer to something a bit more capable of safe towing haha....

at NEFR last year, we got towed by that van after we broke the e30 - correction, we got towed by a trailer, with a car on it (with two people in that car), that was being towed by that van.....

It is a rally community legend

Woody said:

You’re talking about subsets of subsets of marketing segments for manufacturers. 

point taken, but just last year Nissan had that big ad campaign with the Altima "disguised" as a race car. It was totally lame, but I guess it must have worked since they ran it forever. And while racing on a track is maybe a slightly larger subset of subsets than rally, it seems that rally is now much trendier than track racing for the 20-something crowd for obvious reasons, with some crossover to the off-roading scene. Jeep (and all other SUV makers, really) have been marketing all the off-road exploits of their vehicles for decades, even though only a tiny fraction of Jeep owners ever actually take them wheeling. 

I suppose what I mean, is - like the Altima "race car" ad acting like it's so high-performance it "could" be a race car, Coudln't Honda (for instance) use the rally Passport to prove how "tough" and "high performance" the Passport is, even though it's really just a Odyssey with different skin?

Hell, guess what was 3rd overall (out of 70+ cars) at SOFR and beat the pants off a couple dozen Subarus? The one and only known Lexus rally car on this continent (or anywhere, that I know of)

Yeah, that's an IS350 ....

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I have RA mudflaps on my GTI (which has no other rally-style stulff) mostly because I just it keeps the car cleaner (and because we may use it for rally recce sometime in the future, once I get a skidplate for it). 

Again, just an exercise in thought, more than anything else. 

Woody said:

You’re talking about subsets of subsets of marketing segments for manufacturers. 

I agree. 

And I still think they should do it. 

Mitsubishi tried it. Maybe they were just too soon to the trend, maybe they didn't "Walk The Walk" enough, maybe they were just too... Mitsubishi.

My 2004 Lancer Ralliart, DD/ commuter since 2009. 

Hell all kinds of cars has rally errr, Rallye packages back in the 70s. They need to bring that back. 

Jeep, ever the innovator, decided to jump into the Rallye game with the ever popular Compass in 2007.

And my all-time favorite Rallye package car that we never got over here. The Peugeot 106 Rallye. 

If I were a rich man I would totally import one.

In reply to irish44j :

Bad mouthing the van that towed your busted German pile home.  There's some gratitude...

Streetwiseguy said:

In reply to irish44j :

Bad mouthing the van that towed your busted German pile home.  There's some gratitude...

The van actually runs better the more bad things you say about it. But seriously, Dan is super-fast rally driver, but as good as he is at driving, he is equally bad at organizing and maintaining his vehicles, especially the van. If that van ever got in an accident, the driver and passengers would be killed by flying stuff from the back lol. But Dan = no berkeleys given, 100% of the time. 

I think it’s tied to the ideals that people have about adventuring and traveling. A car or SUV with a hint of off road capability is an investment in adventure, even if it never happens. I’ll be the first to admit that I love the style and find it massively appealing. Im planning to sell my MS3 but for a while I was daydreaming about Sparco Terra’s and a small lift (speaking of Wyatt Knox). Originally I wanted a WRX do build this way but finances prevented that. It’s also somewhat practical to build a fast car with some suspension travel and sidewalls, Los Angeles streets aren’t too great... 

Also there’s something cool about a car doing something it was never designed to do. A rally 911? Awesome. I’m all for it. 

spandak said:

 

Also there’s something cool about a car doing something it was never designed to do. A rally 911? Awesome. I’m all for it. 

There's one currently running here in the US with ARA. Hopefully I will get to run against it at STPR later this year :)

If you haven't seen "Desert Raiders" (a documentary about 911's running Paris-Dakar), you really should.... 

EDIT: Desert Raiders wasn't specifically about the Porsches, there's another good documentary about Jackie Ickx running it, but I can't seem to find it on youtube now. 

Isn’t this what basically gave us the original Subaru Outback, Outback Sport, Crosstrek, the original 2.5 RS, the Audi Allroad and the Volvo...umm...Outroad? Normal cars butched up with off-road ride heights and cues. The market certainly responded, and it’s been two decades. Hardly sudden. 

Keith Tanner said:

Isn’t this what basically gave us the original Subaru Outback, Outback Sport, Crosstrek, the original 2.5 RS, the Audi Allroad and the Volvo...umm...Outroad? Normal cars butched up with off-road ride heights and cues. The market certainly responded, and it’s been two decades. Hardly sudden. 

Not referring to factory-built, mildly-lifted regular cars with big tires. None of those cars every claimed to be "rally cars" or anything of the sort, that I recall. They were basically just built and marketed as a way to let people go camping off the beaten path in their "cars" without having to buy trucks.....Such cars have always been around from manufacturers - AMC was making them long before any of those. Again the difference between marketing as "adventure" vehicles vs. rally vehicles. 

My original reference was to the trend of aftermarket or "show" builds claiming to be "rally" or "safari" just because they lift up the suspension and put on off-road tires (see: the Civic Type R thread, the Jag F-Type thread, and many others on other forums). Which of course, is kind of funny since most actual rally cars don't use especially big tires or especially tall suspensions. 

Yeah, people have been dropping car bodies on truck frames forever, but it used to be mostly a goofy redneck thing, or so you could take your 4x4 Camaro mud-bogging on the way to go hunting. Now there are people in my parking garage at my white-collar workplace with lifted BR-Zs with Hella light pods on the front. It's more mainstream now, and done with new cars now, and it's about style, not functionality.  But IDK....you sell the Paco kit, dont' you? What do your customers "say" they are building - a "rally" Miata? a "rock-crawler" Miata? Or just a novelty item to be different?

If I can manage to rectify the more glaring faults in my Saab C900, I fully intend for it eventually to have some mild rallyesque styling cues: lots of big round driving lights, white wheels (well, the ones with the snow tires on them anyway; the Super Aeros wouldn't look right), big mudflaps (I've already mounted the rears, mostly because the factory ones were long gone), and a skidplate of some sort. I've even toyed with the idea of a very mild (1") lift, but I want to drive it at normal height for a while first to see how I feel about it.

Of course, I'll feel less silly about doing all this once I actually rallyx and/or TSD rally it.

02Pilot said:

If I can manage to rectify the more glaring faults in my Saab C900, I fully intend for it eventually to have some mild rallyesque styling cues: lots of big round driving lights, white wheels (well, the ones with the snow tires on them anyway; the Super Aeros wouldn't look right), big mudflaps (I've already mounted the rears, mostly because the factory ones were long gone), and a skidplate of some sort. I've even toyed with the idea of a very mild (1") lift, but I want to drive it at normal height for a while first to see how I feel about it.

Of course, I'll feel less silly about doing all this once I actually rallyx and/or TSD rally it.

I mean, I'm not criticizing the look. My WRX never left the street (it was on Racecomp Tarmac suspension), but it had RA mudflaps and the silly Subaru "rally pig" stickers on it. I like the "rally look" personally. 

The faux-rally look would be a better marketing tool than “grounded to the ground” ever was.

With that guy in the first part of your post, I’d ask him (since you’d know the truth) what races, when, what class he races in. As I get older, I’ve learned just innocently asking questions is enough to make younger kids realize A) they’re talking to an adult who’s been around and B) that fantasizing is NOT doing.

That being said, I love the rally look. I wouldn’t have a single negative thought about the rally  lights, the wheels, tires, mud flaps, stickers whatever on a street car in an effort to get that rally look. I WOULD however call out a guy pretending HE actually rallied if he didn’t.

I think the 1999 Subaru 2.5 RS was pretty clearly going for “rally car”, especially when it got the full STi nose.

And other than the size of the knobs on the rubber, I’m not sure I see the distinction between a lifted, big tire Outback and a lifted, big tire Subaru rally wagon.  

Imagine a tall Miata with mudflaps, white wheels and a poseur rally paint job. How ridiculous ;)

BTW, our customers just say they’re building a lifted Miata. What happens after that, I’m not sure.