I Tried to Fix the Biggest Problem With the Subaru WRX

本站添加: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]I spent the last 3 years trying to solve the biggest problem with the Subaru WRX, and that's the VB and VA gen WRX. If you have a 2015 through 2026 Subaru WRX, I've been trying to solve your biggest problem. Who am I to solve your biggest problem? I'm not just a Subaru YouTuber, but I own J X R Performance and have R&D money to put in to try and solve problems. You might be asking yourself, "What is this problem? He hasn't talked about it." Well, we're going to dive into that because I'm going to tell you about the problem, whether you know that you have it or not, you have it. I'm going to tell you about tell you about what I tried to do to solve it, and ultimately my bad news of I don't have an answer yet for this problem. So, if you own a VA or VB WRX, most of you guys who follow this channel own a 2022 plus WRX.

[00:00:44]The biggest problem that you face with this car, the absolute largest problem, hear me out, is your transmission. If you're going to have fun with this car, whether you're stock now and eventually won't be stock, or think that you're going to be stock forever and eventually won't be stock, you're probably going to tune these cars eventually, and the weak point, especially with the VB WRX, that's the 2022 plus WRX, is the transmission.

[00:01:07]These engines, these FA24 engines in these cars are absolutely nothing short of incredible. You can make so much power to the point where you really start to crap out on the maximum potential of the transmission. The same is actually true with the VA WRX. The engine isn't as robust, but oftentimes you find yourself capping out at what the you know, the maximum torque that that transmission can deal with. So, I've taken upon myself to say, "Well, how do we solve this?" Everybody, for the most part, that does a high horsepower build on this car, puts in an STI transmission. They do an STI transmission swap. The problem with that is it's hard to do, it's very, very, very expensive, and there's a lot of nuance to it where it's like a little bit of custom fab or custom work every situation because you're not getting the same type of STI transmission. So, I've tried to tackle this problem, and I'm going to tell you about it. I'm going to tell you what the outcomes are, and um well, I haven't really fixed it yet, but I I we're getting there. We're working on it. So, if you didn't know this is a problem, stick through and you'll hear more about it, and I don't know. Subscribe to the channel.

[00:02:08]This is going to be a good one. So, the 20 seconds of background. When you tune these cars, you can make a boatload of power, but more importantly, you can make a boatload of torque. The WRX transmissions in the VA and VB WRX just don't love a ton of torque. They are torque limited. If you can fix the torque, i.e., better flywheel, better clutch, doesn't really change that much. You still are limited to the internals of the actual transmission itself, which is capped at torque and horsepower. So, these cars can make quite They could be very, very fast given the right situation with the right transmission. That's the background. That's all you need to know.

[00:02:42]And a better transmission is just a better transmission. We These cars are screaming for an STI transmission. Why did Subaru didn't give us one out of the factory? I will never know. It is the biggest hole in these cars ever. My car has so much pollen in it. So, with that being said, two-pronged approach. First prong is do I build my own and design my own transmission for these cars? The answer is probably not because whether you could whether you can and cannot do that, you The answer is you definitely can do that. Whether you, the watcher of this, if you're like, I want to build one of these things so I'm racing Lambos, which you could do with the right transmission, the answer is you probably don't want to pay for it. And that's totally reasonable. A $10,000 transmission is just it's not in the cards. Nobody should be paying $10,000 for a transmission. So, the second option is how do we STI swap a lot of VB WRXs?

[00:03:30]Well, right now, the barrier to entry is you got to find the transmission, which means you got to find it. You got to find the differential. You got to find all the other aspects to doing the full swap. That's not easy to do for the average person who doesn't really understand what they're looking for.

[00:03:43]Even for your everyday mechanic where you're pretty confident in what you're doing, like you can pull an engine, you can put an engine in back in, finding the right parts in the right go pretty hard. And what ends up happening with a lot of people is they get 90% of the parts right and then they need the leftover 10% but they don't realize that they because the 90% of parts that they bought that the leftover 10% could be very unique to the 90% not just to all situations. So it gets really messy really quickly. Also, if you do this in one off time, if you do this as a one off, could also cost you about 10 grand to put an STI transmission in this car.

[00:04:14]So in short, I ditched the idea of building a transmission. I ditched the idea of trying to make some hybrid clutch which clutch companies and torque and flywheel companies are already doing. There's already good options out there. And I also ditched the option of rebuilding transmissions for other people because that is not as accessible. It doesn't make sense to take your transmission, have it to send it into somebody, then work on it and send it back. Or having a shell or donor because that system, it just doesn't work. You know, from a business standpoint, from a consumer standpoint, for the amount of financial onus that's on the person, you just don't want to do that. So I dumped that one. Maybe we can custom build them for some people. But where am I now? The idea was I was going to make it my business, my life to accumulate as many STI transmissions as possible.

[00:05:01]Here's the thing. If you're buying them at scale, it can work, right? When you're buying them individually, it doesn't really make sense because these cars, when you wreck an STI or an STI gets totaled or salvaged, typically they go to like middlemen, right? And then you pay and then that middleman gets sells it to another middleman which then you buy it from auction from. So you think you're getting a discounted price at auction, but it's already being marked up and it's already being marked up for people that are buying it for the transmission or the engine. The idea that I had and the idea that I've been trying to work with with and pursue is to cut out that middleman and for me to buy just a ton of STI transmissions and parts for these cars because it's not unheard of that there are actually a lot of wrecked STI transmissions out there on the market. It's actually they're more available than you'd think but they're sitting in lots where you need to buy basically all of them or these cars are getting parted out by bigger companies and you're actually never seeing the output of it. Sounds all good and dandy. Will everybody get one? No, it doesn't work that way. You know, but you know, it'd be great for me to have 10 or 12 or 15 or 50 on hand that I could be ready to sell customers, but it's soup to nuts. You go on a website, you say I want to upgrade my transmission, this is what you're going to do. X, Y, and Z. You're going to buy this, it's going to cost you this much, it's a affordable. Maybe there's an instruction manual how to do yourself or an instruction manual for a shop if you want to take it to the shop or something like that. But you're not having to guess all the parts work, they're all fitted the correct way, they're off a reasonable car, you have the history cuz that's the other thing. You see all the time somebody on Facebook Marketplace with an STI transmission, right? You have no idea what it's coming off of.

[00:06:35]That could that transmission could have 300,000 mi on it or it could have been absolutely beat on by a 1,000 horsepower STI. You just don't know. This all sounds great, right? You're probably like me being like, yeah, I would spend money doing this because this whole system works. That's exactly what I want. Here's the problem. Business metrics just don't make sense and that's why nobody is doing it to scale.

[00:06:54]No matter what I do, I can't get over the hurdle of the initial cost. No matter it's and it's not even really a money thing because like I don't mind going and raising capital, right? I'm not made of money. I don't have unlimited money. But I don't mind going and raising money. But from a business standpoint cuz I'm breaking that that that veil for you guys so you guys can understand the actual business side of the parts that you buy when you're modifying your cars. To do the initial upfront amount of work here, it's not just buying the transmission.

[00:07:22]It's the freight routes cuz you have to freight these to people. It's the tooling to test it. It's creating all the jigs to make things work. It's the initial I'm going to buy extras of everything because, you know, you guys don't see it when you're buying individual individual parts, but 10% of people that buy car parts, they're going to break something and then threaten to sue you because they broke something installing it and you have to send them an extra. It happens. It's terrible.

[00:07:44]Don't do that if you're one of those people that do does it cuz if you break something on an install it's entirely your fault. You don't deserve to get something for free, but it happens. So as an automotive company, we have to be like, well, we don't want lawsuits. So we have to have extra things.

[00:07:56]Short answer is the first 50 transmissions that you were to do this with, they'd probably cost 40 to 70% more than all the transmissions after the first 50, but it's impossible to sell to do this and charge people what it would cost them to basically do all the work at the get-go.

[00:08:13]Which means which sounds like such a cop-out. I'm not asking you guys for money just to be very clear. It's just that that's why it's not working is it's a cost thing. People don't want to spend it. Right now you're probably looking at like at scale if you want all these guarantees that it's all going to work and it's all going to fit up and you're not taking all those risks on yourself, right? Cuz you have to those all cost money to a business.

[00:08:33]We're We're at many Let's just Let's just say many thousands of dollars for the transmission. We're closer to 10,000 than we are to 1,000. We're not 10,000, but like I don't actually know we I didn't get that far through. It's you know, it's more than It's well, some of them would be around 5,000. Some of them would be like 8,000 depending on the mileage. It's just a lot of money. It's more than I wanted it to. You can probably source your own for about $8,000 and then own all the risk. What you're basically paying for is not having the risk. But it begs the problem. At the same time, we're seeing other cars with better transmissions that can put out better numbers. And I talk about this all the time on the channel, but it's a big deal because less people are investing large amounts of money into these cars because of just that, because of the fact that they don't really need to anymore. So now you're probably asking yourself, what was the point of this video? Well, the point is that Well, one, truly the biggest problem with these cars is the transmission.

[00:09:25]There really aren't any other problems with the car. At least I haven't really seen them at scale. Things happen with them, but you know, things happens with things happen with all the cars. One of these days I'm going to get punished for saying that and and I'm going to have like a random engine failure. Uh it's probably going to happen. Um but the transmission is the biggest part. Is there an off-the-shelf off-the-shelf solution right now? There isn't. And are am I still trying to figure one out? Yeah. I wanted to make this video because I've been telling you guys that I've been working on this for literally forever. It's been 3 years now.

[00:09:56]I we've had customers get STI transmissions in terms of testing the whole workflow and how this works and you know, does the whole system work?

[00:10:03]And yeah, it it's run smoothly. It's a click and ship, you know, right?

[00:10:08]But the cost is the big thing, right?

[00:10:10]So, part of the whole point of this video is one, just to be open, show you guys what's on the other side of the veil here, but also ask you guys, if you, let's say have a VB WRX or VA WRX, what would you be willing to pay for a transmission where you're not capped in any sense in power? You can make the true power on these cars. It's like the idea you could probably make with, you know, with ethanol, with bolt-ons, like this engine can comfortably make, you know, 500 wheel horsepower. That's like pretty comfortable, but that's like I must baby the transmission and you're not going to get a full life out of the transmission level of power, let alone torque. We just don't really know because most tuners aren't pushing the cars that hard because the transmission is the weak point. But let's say you could pay some amount of money that you could just reach that extra amount of horsepower and torque. And uh just for you guys to understand, like that's supercar speed. When we're pushing all-wheel drive on this platform, that kind of power and torque, you're talking about like, you know, a Lambo is going to have a very hard time, very, very hard time keeping up with you, right?

[00:11:12]We're talking real power.

[00:11:14]What is that worth for you guys? And I'm not saying that like this isn't meant to be a research video, but this is genuinely like we need to all put our heads together because again, you might not know this is a problem and it might only affect 10% of you, but what I will say and die for that if you plan on owning a WRX for more than, let's say, 5 years, right? So, let's say you have one right now or you're thinking about buying one. You're like, I'm going to own one for more than 5 years. I promise you I actually I don't promise you. I guarantee you this is something that you will think about for yourself. It will cross your mind in those 5 years.

[00:11:44]Food for thought. Hope you guys enjoyed the video. I'll see you guys in the next one.