Subaru yanks concept label, begins testing Stella plug-in EV

by Darren Murph, posted Apr 20th 2009 at 8:21AM

Anyone that follows the automobile sector with any semblance of regularity would know that quite a few concepts never make it beyond the drawing board. Thankfully, Subaru's Stella is one of the lucky ones. Fuji Heavy Industries, parent company and maker of Subaru automobiles, has just announced its plans to begin testing prototypes of its Subaru plug-in Stella electric vehicle, which will be introduced in Japan this summer. Furthermore, the company has managed to boost power output from 40kW in the previous iteration to 47kW, and it also stripped away some unnecessary weight and fine-tuned the output management system. There's no mention of a price or expected launch date in North America, but you'll never stop us from hoping the answer to the latter is "soon."