Subaru won’t sell you a WRX hatch, so why not make your own?

We all want what we can’t have. For some, it’s a European vacation or an exotic honeymoon. For others, it’s a forbidden pet, like a snake (scary) or a cat (allergies).

For one Subaru enthusiast, however, he wanted a modern WRX hatchback, one based on the latest-generation WRX.

“The Crosstrek is my first car, and from the very beginning, I always had a vision for the ultimate version of it,” Stephen, our Subaru owner, explains. “I’ll concede that on paper it doesn’t really seem like it would be worth the time/money/effort, but the intangibles are what convinced me that it would be worth it in the end.”

But since Subaru doesn’t offer one, why not simply swap a WRX engine into a Crosstrek or an Impreza hatchback? It’s practically plug and play, right?

Not at all, according to Dan Hurwitz, owner of longtime Subaru speed shop Mach V Motorsports of Sterling, Virginia.

It all started when a customer, Stephen, walked into the shop one day hoping that Mach V could turbocharge his Subaru Crosstrek.

“He explains that he’s kind of a super nut and that he has this bee in his bonnet that he would like to turbocharge his Crosstrek,” Hurwitz explains. “I was like, ‘You can't do that–or you can, but nobody does that.’”

That did little to dissuade Stephen, who then suggested that since the Crosstrek and WRX are built on the same platform, why not simply take an engine out of a current-gen WRX and put it into a Crosstrek, making the WRX hatch that Subaru won’t (not counting the not-in-production Performance-B STI concept, of course)?

To find out if it was even feasible, the first step was to put both the WRX and Crosstrek on the lift.

“We put those on the lift together, side by side, and took out the tape measure and measured the sort of the hard points of both cars,” Hurwitz says. “And sure enough, they’re identical, like the front suspension bolt pickup point all the way back to the rear suspension.”

So, while the exterior lengths, widths and heights may have differed, at least the basic bones were similar enough.

The next step, then, was to acquire a heart donor. In this case, the customer picked up a current-generation, VB-chassis WRX that had a rear door caved in, and had it brought to his house. There, he took out the interiors and much of the wiring harnesses of both the Crosstrek and WRX.

Hurwitz adds that the customer also “did as much as he could at home,” which included installing the WRX’s dash beam, rear subframes and much of the rear suspension into the Crosstrek.

Then it was up to Mach V to take out the engine, transmission, front suspension and front subframe from the WRX altogether and fit it into the Crosstrek.

Once swapped over, all that was needed was to plug in a few wires, add some oil and fuel and start it up, right?

Before he even gets into the details, I can tell from the tone of Hurwitz’s voice that this was, in fact, not the case.

Sure, the WRX engine did fit in the Crosstrek, but that was just a drop in the bucket of work that needed to be completed.

As Hurwitz explains, despite having an engine that fit perfectly into the Crosstrek, one of the customer’s priorities was that the “WRX hatchback” had to look like it came from the factory–a wish that added a whole new layer of complexity.

“He not only wanted the drivetrain, he wanted the whole nose, including the buffed-out fenders and the longer front, with the big grille and with the big radiator, which involved much more work,” Hurwitz tells us.

This meant that before reassembling the car, Mach V had to roll it–in pieces–to the local body shop for the necessary changes.

This is when Hurwitz hits us with one of many fun facts that highlight the numerous differences between the WRX and the Crosstrek: The wider rear fenders from the WRX are made out of aluminum, while the ones on the Crosstrek are made out of steel–which rules out welding the pieces together–and that’s not even considering that both cars have different doors, and that those doors have entirely different contours, too.

Luckily, the body shop had a clever solution: The fenders from both cars were cut in half and then joined via an intermediate fiberglass strip. Then, it was a simpler job of filling and sanding down the area to hide the joint.

And then there were all the ancillary components to consider.

For example, the WRX comes with automatic up-and-down rear windows not found on the Crosstrek, and the Crosstrek is equipped with a wiper and washer for the rear hatch glass that the WRX doesn’t have, meaning you can’t just plug everything in and expect everyone to play nicely with one another.

“We had to custom wire the windows and bypass the body control module and just run new wiring harnesses all the way from the windows to the front door wiring switch,” Hurwitz explains. “And the WRX didn’t come with a rear wiper, so it has no mechanism and no wiring harness for that–so again, custom wiring all the way from the back of the car.”

Hurwitz also adds that the taillights required custom wiring, as did the wiring for the rear hatch–and then there were the rear seat belts.

The donor Crosstrek was not originally equipped with the pyrotechnic seat belt pretensioners used in the rear seats of the WRX, so the WRX’s pretensioners needed to be installed in the Crosstrek.

Adding to the issue, however, was that one of the WRX’s rear pretensioners was already blown because of the accident it had been involved in. The main airbag module also had to be sent off to clear out the fault codes from the accident.

“Each of these is a little detail, but, you know, it takes an hour here and 2 hours there, and then suddenly it's like–it’s a lot of work,” Hurwitz explains.

A time-consuming project? Absolutely, but could this project be built by someone like one of our readers in their home garage?

“Yeah, it could,” Hurwitz states with a pause, “but the whole thing is sort of preposterously time- or money-consuming.”

But isn’t GRM the home of preposterously time- and money-consuming projects? Well, yes, but Hurwitz is quick to explain working with modern cars adds significant complexity, especially when it comes to wiring.

The amount of time it takes to just pull out the wiring harness from a car without damaging it? Hurwitz, for this instance, throws out a ballpark figure of around 16 hours–but that’s just for one car. The customer did the process twice.

Then add in all the hours both Mach V and the body shop sunk into completing the project.

How much did all this work cost? While the customer, Stephen, didn’t wish to disclose the final dollar amount, Hurwitz was contacted by someone else who had built a similar project–but with a Subaru Ascent engine instead of one from a WRX–who claimed that he completed his project for around $55,000.

All that time, effort and money spent: Was it worth it?

A brand-new Civic Type R, Hyundai Elantra N, Volkswagen Golf R and even the WRX all carry starting prices of less than $50,000.

Just as well, examples of the latest WRX, with fewer than 20,000 miles on the odometer, can be found for as little as $20,000 on the used market.

And although Stephen admits that he was close to walking away from the idea, he went on to explain: “I wanted to prove (mainly to myself) that I could turn a dream of mine into a reality, and in doing so, do justice to a car that holds such immense sentimental value to me.”

Okay, sure, a case can be made for making a DIY hatch version of the newest WRX (even Hurwitz acknowledges that, and we’re no strangers to all-consuming passion projects, either), but it’s going to take a metric ton of time, effort and money to accomplish those dreams.

But damn, it sure is cool.

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