Buying an Evo 5 in Canada?

[Ironchief]

Hello my UK friends! I joined this forum to get some information on the Evo 5's. I live in Canada and currently own a 1990 Celica All Trac (GT4 in the UK I believe) but am seriously considering importing either a JDM Evo 5 or 1998 ish Subaru STI (must wait 15 years to import JDM cars into Canada so the 5's will be coming available in January) But I have some concerns with the Evo 5's:

1) From what I understand the Evo is just an all around better car than the STI and I know you guys may be extremely biased, but is this correct? I can import an Evo for about $11k while I can get a nice STI for about $8k, so there's a substantial difference.

2) Technical know how, are the Evo 5's easy to work on? And reliable?

3) Since Canada only got the evo 10, and the states the evo 7 (in 2003 I think),will many of the 7 or 8's parts be compatible with the 5? I'm worried that if I bought this car and had something break down, I would never be able to find parts for it, or would have to pay ridiculous money to ship them from Japan or the UK.

Thanks so much for any input. And if you have any other advice I'd love to hear it.

 

[fq-craigus]

welcome along pal

 

[meka]

If you're choosing for price buy the subaru.
If you want something different, better and nicer looking, get the Evo.
The parts aren't really that hard to find but you won't be buying them off the shelf anywhere.
You can get any part from the dealerships. Where are you? I'm in Edmonton and the West side Mitsu has Jdm parts lookup and cross reference. Anything they can't get local they can get from Mitsu Japan.
If you work on your own car then you should have no problem ordering parts from internet and waiting.
So finding parts is not really an issue.

Technically, if if you can't do it yourself, can you pay others to do it? There are dyno tuners in RedDeer and Calgary that can tune Evo.

There are a lot of parts that cross over on Evo4 to Evo9. So there's tons of stuff available from states.
I've bought HKS intake for Evo8 from states and 1997Mirage headlights as well.
It's not hard you just have to do your homework.

Get the EVO!
Welcome

 

[Ironchief]

I live in Saskatoon. Where are you at? How's the drive-ability of your evo? Is it easy for every day traffic? I'm planning on using it as a dd.

 

[meka]

Drivability? It drives, it has more power than I need and less than I want.

the stock struts don't seem to last through our winters.

 

[Ironchief]

If struts are all then that's fine. How is the defrost and heat on it for the winter?

And how easy to work on are they?