The 2025 Subaru BRZ Just Might Be The Cure For The Quarter-Life Crisis

Do you remember the first time you picked up a digital camera? You filled up that memory card with reckless abandon, loaded your favorites onto a desktop computer and pushed them until the highlights blinded, the saturation hummed, and stills of the mundane exploded beyond the bounds of the medium. Maybe you’ve shot and edited more mature, more sophisticated shots on more expensive equipment since, or maybe you’ve abandoned the camera in favor of your phone, but you still remember how it first felt to make something.

Driving is much the same. It used to be your ticket to anywhere-but-here, as you turned the key on a cheap or borrowed metallic steed and counted dotted lines under streetlights. McDonald’s might as well have been Mexico, not that you would take off with a be-back note and a suitcase packed, but you could. Knowing so was enough. Through rain and fog, country still and freeway buzz, you’d come to learn the footwork of dancing with your machine. A sweep of the foot, a flick through the gears, turning understeer and oversteer from theory to practice. It didn’t matter what you drove or where you were going, even if the answers to those were nothing much and nowhere in particular.

Now you traipse the pockmarked, gridlocked highways twice a day, not because you want to but because you have to. Bleary-eyed from doomscroll-delayed slumber or beaten down by the tepid monotony of workplace politics, you routinely strap yourself into your seat, embarking on conveyance for the sake of a destination rather than a journey. Purposeful, safe, and frequently passionless, your brain’s slowly come to sever commuting from driving. Maybe digital realms and heel-toe daydreams are your most frequent facsimiles of four-wheeled fun. Maybe you’ve even resigned yourself to seeing rather than doing as to not let that love affair grow cold through computer-generated synthesis and real-world responsibilities. Well, I’m pleased to announce that after trying just about everything under the sun, there is a reasonably priced cure for that. The Subaru BRZ exists to remind you that driving can still be fun, and the Murasaki Edition is the best to do it yet.

[Full disclosure: Subaru Canada let me borrow this BRZ Murasaki Edition for a week so long as I kept the shiny side up, returned it with a full tank of premium fuel, and reviewed it.]

The Basics

Engine: 2.4-liter 16-valve quad-cam naturally aspirated flat-four.

Transmission: Six-speed manual.

Drive: Rear-wheel-drive with Torsen helical limited-slip differential.

Output: 228 horsepower at 7,000 RPM, 184 lb.-ft. at 3,700 RPM.

Fuel Economy: 20 MPG city, 27 MPG highway, 22 MPG combined (12 L/100km city, 8.8 L/100km highway, 10.5 L/100km combined)

Weight: 2,851 pounds (1,293 kilograms)

Base Price: $34,380 ($34,790 in Canada).

As-Tested Price: $41,590 Canadian.

Lucky Us

When Subaru announced it was making a purple BRZ, I was excited. After all, purple cars are rare, and the more manufacturers brighten up the largely greyscale roads, the better. Unfortunately, Galaxy Purple is more allegedly purple in the same way Bud Light is allegedly beer, or Drake is allegedly a rapper. There’s a hint in there on occasion, but most of the time, you’d never know.

This gives more gravity as to how Subaru Canada decided to make its take on the BRZ Series. Purple a bit more special. Instead of running with the mid-range premium trim, its hand went straight to the top shelf for the elixir that is the BRZ tS. It gets sophisticated Hitachi dampers and gold four-piston Brembos, the perfect building block for something rare. To that package, it’s added STI flexible V-bars that tie the strut towers to the firewall with the goal of staying compliant under vertical load and adding stiffening under horizontal load, improving rigidity under hard cornering whilst maintaining chassis flexibility over bumps. The end result is called the Murasaki Edition, Japanese for “purple.”

If you don’t live in Canada, you can add the V-brace to a BRZ tS, but you won’t get the barely-purple paint or the console badge, and you certainly won’t get the limited-edition trading card that comes with the Murasaki Edition. Encased in acrylic and propped up by its own matching stand, it’s a nice touch that reminds you of your car while you’re at your desk, slogging through another Teams meeting that could’ve been done remotely.

Tastes Like The Real Thing

So, how well does the BRZ get those adolescent sports car butterflies going? Quite well, it turns out. Alright, the steering isn’t anything like most sports cars of old, in that you don’t get rich-as-red velvet road texture telegraphed to your fingertips, but it melds red-dot accuracy with cinematic fluidity in a way that lets you place the car where you want while still receiving feedback once the front tires get close to the brink of push. At the same time, the Hitachi dampers are an absolute cheat code, with the front units in particular melding air-cushion ride quality over expansion joints with the body control of a zinc countertop. People with Snell-rated lab coats call this a digressive damping curve, but you can call it a fast road setup.

Take the hairpin, pirouette on contact patches, center of mass tight to your hips like prom night, this is a capital-S sports car. Not some watered-down sports coupe that’s obviously based on an executive sedan, not an economy car with five figures worth of go-fast bits on it, the real deal. A curb weight under 3,000 pounds, a row-your-own transmission, drive to the back, and a footprint just small enough that you wear it.

Punch the skinny pedal on exit, and you’re reminded of a truth in natural aspiration, oversquare engines, and high power peaks: There’s a reward near the top of the tach, go get it. Indeed, even though the tachometer squishes everything below 4,000 RPM right down in track mode, that’s never really an issue. Is it quick? If this were the early 2000s, it would be a belter. With 228 horsepower on tap, close ratios, and only 2,851 pounds to push around, figure a zero-to-60 mph time just under six seconds. In the real world with traffic cops and speed cameras, that’s still enough, yeah?

For 2025, Subaru’s revised the powertrain mapping for better drivability, and you know what? It mostly works, so long as you’re deliberate with shifting through the slick, well-defined gates. The revs are slow to fall on the overrun if you’ve lifted without drivetrain load, but ensure you’re all the way off the skinny pedal before you downshift and you rarely feel rev hang. As a consolation prize for the occasional wait for the revs to drop on the way up, the powertrain calibration tweaks for 2025 make it even easier to heel-toe the BRZ

Oh, and when you’re done having your fun and need to settle down, you’ll find that the second-generation BRZ is far more refined than the original. It’s quieter at a cruise, the interior’s more richly appointed, and the swiveling LED headlights do a proper job of illuminating the night. The torque dip has been greatly diminished over the first-generation car so that the lowest point of the dip is still higher than the old car’s torque peak, resulting in gratification without having to wind the engine out all the time. I even managed a real-world 26 MPG, or 8.9 L/100km, which isn’t bad considering the extra juice under the hood.

Such Holidays In The Sun Don’t Come Without Sacrifices

Other than the closest offering in America to the Murasaki being the non-purple $39,530 BRZ tS, what’s the rub? Well, to offer a proper tin-top sports car for normal car money, you’re going to have to live with some tradeoffs. Let’s start with the rear seat. It’s spacious enough for short journeys, but after spending an hour in the back of another current-shape BRZ, I learned the hard way that it’s indeed possible to get glute cramps from sitting down. Speaking of road trips, you have to choose between whether you want cup holders or an armrest at any given time, which can be a bit annoying if you’re the sort to drink your coffee in the car.

The stereo seems to have eleventeen different equalizer and signal processing functions, all of which make it sound like you’re trying to show Spongebob Squarepants what you’re listening to. You occasionally hear people complain about speakers sounding muddy, but these ones sound soggy. Oh, and Apple CarPlay is wired-only, which wouldn’t be a problem if the USB port weren’t in the console and there was somewhere else to stash your phone other than the cup holders.

Then there’s over-the-shoulder visibility. Actually, there isn’t. Even with clever mirror positioning, the sizeable pillars and roof rails mean that when pulling out of an oblique junction, standard procedure involves trusting the blind spot monitoring and praying. However, beyond these little quibbles, there’s a benefit in how Subaru and Toyota designed the BRZ, too. The fold-down rear seat means the cargo area is far more usable than you might expect, physical controls exist for just about everything, the steering wheel is just about perfect, and the seats are all-day comfortable. The BRZ is a far more practical only-car than a Mazda MX-5, and that’s enough to really get the imagination going.

Superman That

For the money and when considering relative practicality, the BRZ’s sense of agility is just epic, a lithe, classically trained backroad dancer improved by an excellent set of dampers. Whether the Canadian-only Murasaki Edition or the BRZ tS, you’re looking at the best tin-topped sports car under $75,000. You can buy quicker machines, ones that generate more stick in the corners, ones with more luxury and more space, but I’ve yet to drive one in this price bracket that feels so instinctive, so willing, so much like you’d imagine a sports car would be.

If you’ve always wanted to own a sports car but need the safety and convenience of a warranty and a fixed roof and easy financing, this is your sign to find joy in commuting. On-ramps become the Karussell, or Aintree, or Portier. You’ll find that your local drive-thru has apexes, that off-ramps have braking zones, and that a perfect heel-toe downshift is more gratifying than any dual-clutch wizardry. It won’t be as easy as inching along on semi-autonomous mode, but indulging your imagination requires more effort than mindlessly flicking through Instagram reels. Put a little bit into it, and before you know it, you’ll be having fun. Your last recess ended when you were a child. When was the last time you played every day?

Top graphic image: Thomas Hundal

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