The Subaru Impreza is a compact car that competes with cars such as the Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic, Nissan Sentra, Mitsubishi Lancer and Mazda 323 - and only the Impreza has always been able to offer the AWD variant, and in 1996 Subaru made this feature standard on some markets. The Impreza has continued the tradition of the boxer-type engine - according to Subaru, this configuration (horizontally lying and sliding cylinders facing each other) has a lower center of gravity and is lightweight, well-suited to the all-wheel drive system. The Boxer-type engine has extremely low vibrations, as they are compensated by sliding cylinders in front of each other, so no balancers are used, and a very small torque-influenced effect of the car's torque is felt.