Ask a hundred people to name the most progressive car company in America and most will say Tesla, or maybe Ford. They would be wrong, and it is not close. The most reliably progressive automaker in our database is the one parked outside every trailhead in Colorado: Subaru of America, which scores 80/100 on the BuyWokeFree Woke Score — extremely woke, and the highest mark of any automaker we have rated.
That is higher than Stellantis at 70, the parent of Jeep, Ram, and Dodge. Higher than Ford Motor at 66. Higher than General Motors at 62. It is four times the score of Tesla at 20, and eight times Nissan at 10.
Why Subaru Scores Higher Than Detroit
Here is the part that surprises people: Subaru did not drift into this. Detroit picked up its diversity programs in the 2010s, largely because institutional investors and HR consultants told it to. Subaru built its progressive identity in the 1990s, on purpose, as a survival strategy — and it has never meaningfully walked it back. That is why a mid-size importer outscores companies twenty times its size.
Our 80 reflects four things: a long and documented record of perfect scores on the Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index, an active executive-level diversity council, three decades of explicitly LGBTQ-targeted marketing, and political contributions that lean Democratic. What it does not reflect is a company that got caught up in a trend. Subaru was there first.
Thirty Years of the Most Deliberate LGBTQ Marketing in the Car Business
In the mid-1990s Subaru was in trouble. Sales were sliding, a sports car had flopped, and a splashy new ad agency had not fixed it. So the company did what small brands do when they cannot outspend anyone: it went looking for niches.
Subaru marketers identified four groups responsible for roughly half of American sales — teachers, healthcare workers, IT professionals, and outdoorsy "rugged individualists." Then, according to trade-press accounts of the campaign, they found a fifth. In places like Northampton, Massachusetts and Portland, Oregon, an unusual share of buyers were single women heading their own households, and many of them were lesbians. They liked the all-wheel drive, the cargo room, and the fact that the car hauled gear without being a truck.
Subaru made a decision almost no major advertiser would make at the time: it marketed to them directly. This was the era when companies pulled advertising from Ellen over a single coming-out episode. Subaru went the other way, ran ads in gay and lesbian publications, and later brought on openly gay tennis champion Martina Navratilova as a pitchwoman. The nickname "Lesbaru" was not invented by critics — it became an affectionate customer identity the company was happy to let ride.
Give the strategy its due: it worked. It rescued the brand, and it is widely credited with moving gay and lesbian advertising from the fringe into the mainstream of American marketing. That is precisely why the score is an 80. This is not a company that added a rainbow logo in June 2021. This is the company that wrote the playbook everyone else copied.
2025 Was the Year of the Rollback. Subaru Sat It Out.
The last two years gutted corporate DEI. Companies scrubbed diversity pages overnight, renamed departments, dropped out of the Corporate Equality Index, and let Pride sponsorships lapse. Our own Harley-Davidson profile sits at 10 today largely because the company retreated hard after sustained customer pressure.
Subaru did not do that. As of this writing its Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging page is still live on subaru.com, and its Corporate Impact Report still carries a full DEIB section. There is a language shift worth reporting honestly: the company says that in 2025 it expanded its focus "beyond traditional" DEIB toward a more holistic employee experience. Read that carefully. That is a softening of vocabulary, not a dismantling of the program — the same move dozens of firms made to lower their profile without changing what they actually do.
The Diversity Council Still Meets
The structure is intact. Subaru reports that senior leaders on its Executive Diversity Council convene quarterly to strengthen inclusion inside the company, and that it extends those practices outward to its retailers and their staff. The company also promotes recognition like Newsweek Greatest Workplaces 2025 and a Forbes Best Brands for Social Impact placement. Those are not the artifacts of a business quietly backing away.
What We Verified — and What We Did Not
We hold ourselves to the same standard we hold these companies to. Subaru of America has publicly announced perfect 100 scores on the HRC Corporate Equality Index across multiple consecutive years, documented in its own newsroom — a 2021 release marked a fifth straight perfect score. We could not independently confirm a current 2026 CEI figure for Subaru, so treat the CEI record as a long and consistent history rather than a this-year claim. The 2025 DEIB language and the Executive Diversity Council cadence come from Subaru corporate materials published in 2026.
How the Rest of the Lot Scores
- Subaru of America — 80, extremely woke
- Stellantis — 70, woke
- Ford Motor — 66, woke
- General Motors — 62, woke
- Tesla — 20, mildly woke
- Nissan — 10, mildly woke
- Harley-Davidson — 10, mildly woke (motorcycles, but the clearest rollback story in the garage)
The Bottom Line
Subaru is not hiding anything, and we are not going to pretend it is a scandal. The company told you exactly who it was in 1995 and has been consistent ever since — which, frankly, is more honesty than you get from the automakers who discovered diversity in 2015 and misplaced it in 2025.
But consistency is not neutrality. If you do not want your money underwriting a three-decade advocacy program, an 80 is an 80, and Subaru is the highest-scoring automaker on our board. Among household names, Nissan at 10 and Tesla at 20 are the low scorers, and you can compare the full field on our non-woke automotive brands page. One honest caveat for shoppers: at the genuinely woke-free end of that category you will mostly find independent mechanics, body shops, and specialty outfits rather than major manufacturers. In a consolidated industry, the truly unscored option is usually the shop down the road, not another badge on the hood.