Subaru Logo: Meaning of the Six Stars and History

Today the emblem is a blue oval holding six four-pointed stars, one large and five smaller. Every Subaru car logo since 1953 has shown six stars. Only their layout, color and finish have changed.

What Does the Subaru Logo Mean?

The Subaru logo meaning works on two levels. The badge pictures the Pleiades, the star cluster called Subaru in Japanese, and it marks the merger that created Subaru’s parent company. Fuji Heavy Industries (FHI) was created in 1953 through a merger of five Japanese companies, and it took the Subaru star cluster as the logo for its cars.

How the six stars map onto those companies is less settled. The common explanation gives one large star to Fuji Heavy Industries and five smaller ones to the companies that merged into it. Subaru’s official US history says only that five companies merged and that the cluster became the car logo, without assigning individual stars. Subaru’s Japanese and Asian corporate sites, on the other hand, describe the name as reflecting six companies coming together. Both counts point to the same idea: five merging firms, or six once FHI itself is counted.

What each part of the Subaru symbol is said to stand for:

• Large star: Fuji Heavy Industries, in the common explanation. It only became larger than the others in the 1980s redesign.
• Five smaller stars: Fuji Kogyo, Fuji Jidosha Kogyo, Omiya Fuji Kogyo, Utsunomiya Sharyo and Tokyo Fuji Sangyo, the five companies that merged.
• The cluster as a whole: the Pleiades, and the idea of uniting that the Japanese word carries.
• Oval: the frame that has held the stars in every version. Subaru has not published a meaning for it.

Subaru: the Japanese Name for the Pleiades

Subaru is a Japanese word meaning “unite.” In Japan it also names the Pleiades, a star cluster in the constellation Taurus. The word comes from a verb meaning to gather or cluster together, which suits a company built from a merger. So the Subaru logo constellation is, strictly speaking, a cluster inside Taurus rather than a constellation of its own.

The name was chosen by Kenji Kita, then CEO of Fuji Heavy Industries. For the company’s first car project, the P-1, Kita asked colleagues for name ideas, found none he liked, and picked Subaru, a Japanese name he said he had long cherished. Some logo sites describe a naming contest, but the better-sourced account has Kita choosing the name himself.

Subaru Logo Design: Stars, Oval, Colors and Type

The Subaru emblem has four parts: six four-pointed stars, a horizontal oval, a background color and, on the corporate version, a SUBARU wordmark. The table shows each part as it looks today and what is documented about it.

Element	Current design	What is documented
Stars	Six silver four-pointed stars: one large at the left, five smaller to the right	Six stars in every version since 1953; the large-star layout dates from the 1980s
Oval	Horizontal oval with a thick, three-dimensional silver frame	Present since 1953; no official meaning
Background	Blue gradient, lighter around the largest star	Blue since about 1999; earlier badges were plain metal, gold, red or black
Wordmark	SUBARU in black, all-caps, wide sans-serif letters	Paired with the emblem as the corporate symbol since 2003

On a car, the Subaru emblem on the grille is the oval badge alone. The wordmark belongs to the corporate lockup and to marketing material.

Logo blogs often attach meanings to the blue, the oval shape and the pairs of stars. None of those readings comes from Subaru, so treat them as interpretation rather than fact.

Subaru Logo History and Evolution (1953 to Today)

1. 1953–1958
2. 1958
3. 1960–1970
4. 1971–1980
5. 1980s
6. 1999–2003
7. 2003–2019
8. 2019–Present

The Subaru logo evolution runs through eight main versions, and the six stars and the oval never left. What changed was the star layout, the background color and the finish. Sources disagree on several start years, so the periods below use the best-supported dates, with ranges where they differ. For other badges built around stars, see car logos with stars.

1953–1958: Silver Stars in the Pleiades Layout

The first Subaru emblem was a thin horizontal oval in silver metal, with six four-pointed stars and no background color. The stars sat roughly where the real Pleiades appear in the night sky, so no single star dominated. Thin lines joined most of them at their centers. FHI adopted the design in 1953, before it had a production car to put it on.

1958–c.1960: Gold Stars

In 1958 the badge turned gold. The stars kept the Pleiades layout and the thin connecting lines, but they were drawn lower and wider inside a gold oval, still without a background fill. This was the first colored Subaru logo, and it lasted only about two years.

c.1960–1970: Silver Stars on Red

From around 1960, the silver stars and oval frame sat on a solid red field. The Pleiades layout and the connecting lines stayed. The red badge ran through the 1960s and gave way at the start of the 1970s. Its start year varies by source, from 1959 to 1966.

c.1971–1980: Trapezoid Plate With a Dotted Night Sky

In the 1970s the oval moved onto a wide trapezoid plate, sized to split the low, wide grilles of the period. Inside the oval, the silver stars now sat on a dark night-sky background with a grid of tiny silver dots. The outlines grew thicker, but the stars still followed the Pleiades layout. Some sources describe the plate as U-shaped.

1980s–c.1999: One Large Star on Black

In the 1980s the stars were redrawn into the layout Subaru still uses: one large star at the upper left and five smaller stars to the lower right, with no connecting lines. The silver, three-dimensional stars sat on a solid black oval, and the trapezoid plate was gone. Sources date the change anywhere from 1980 to 1989, and Japanese motoring press ties it to the 1988 Justy.

1999–2003: Blue Gradient and Beveled Stars

Blue arrived around 1999. The black background gave way to a blue gradient that lightens around the largest star, and the stars were flattened and beveled with rounded edges, grouped in three connected pairs. A wider, thicker frame gave the oval a 3D look. Some Japanese sources date the change on production cars to about 2001.

2003–2019: Emblem Plus SUBARU Wordmark

On July 15, 2003, its 50th anniversary, Fuji Heavy Industries made the six-star emblem with a SUBARU logotype its worldwide corporate symbol. The new symbol replaced an older red-circled mark that FHI had used as its corporate logo in Japan. The black, all-caps wordmark sits below or beside the blue oval, while car grilles kept the oval badge alone.

2019–Today: The Current Subaru Logo

The current Subaru logo dates from 2019. It keeps the six-star blue oval and the SUBARU wordmark. Available sources document only the year, not what exactly changed, and any refinement is subtle: side by side, the 2003 and 2019 versions are hard to tell apart.

Old Subaru Logo vs Current Subaru Logo

The quickest way to date an old Subaru logo is to look at the star layout and the background. Before the 1980s the stars copied the Pleiades and none stood out. Since then one large star has led five small ones. Every version has six stars, so the count never helps with dating.

If the badge shows	It is most likely from
Plain silver oval, stars linked by thin lines, no background	1953–1958
Gold oval and gold stars	1958–c.1960
Silver stars on a red background	c.1960–1970
Trapezoid plate with a dotted dark background	c.1971–1980
One large star and five small ones on black	1980s–c.1999
One large star and five small ones on a blue gradient	1999–today (grille badge)
Blue oval with a black SUBARU wordmark	2003–today (corporate logo)

Subaru Logo PNG and Emblem Notes

The Subaru logo PNG above is the current color version: the blue six-star oval with the black SUBARU wordmark on a transparent background. Black-and-white and gloss-black emblems sold for cars are styling variants of the same badge, not new logos. The logo is a trademark of Subaru Corporation, the Japanese company behind the brand. See more Japanese car brands and other blue car logos.