Clearly not developed for the Netherlands. How do you like it?
We have, we can’t help it, a huge soft spot for Subaru. It is one of the few brands with a different conviction, and that is what they are all about. That stubbornness, we love it. Although they have to be careful not to maneuver hard towards the exit, and the latest version of the Subaru Outback almost seems to be a plea for that in many ways.
Subaru stands, in short, for four-wheel drive and boxer engines. That has brought them a lot (a billion WRC wins), but they are not qualities that will make you far in the ‘new world’. The brand is in no rush with things like electrification; that is limited to mounting vacuum cleaner motors in the XV and Forester – laughing stock when it comes to emissions and therefore actually survival. That will probably change in the long run, but in the meantime they are casually aiming a new Subaru Outback on the market that even wants nothing to do with that.
Half SUV
Astonishing, but then again not. After all, Subaru’s most important market is America, where the Outback has been scoring like crazy for years, and the environment and climate are just as important as the color of your underpants. And so the Subaru Outback is ‘completely new’, from chassis to appearance, and at the same time as modern as a coal stove. It’s a lot bigger than before, and where it was the first ‘station that is also good in the terrain’, it is now half an SUV. You’ll notice this, for example, in the seating position, which is just as high as many of the modern ‘SUVs’ that don’t even have a shred of the Outback’s off-road capabilities. If you live in a neighborhood with little asphalt: this is your car.
Watching your fingers
But Subaru is really doing its best to make the Outback better on the road too. It mainly seeks the solution in electronics, which are partly top-notch, partly dramatic. Some years ago it developed EyeSight, the umbrella name for all safety electronics. The resulting active cruise control is one of the best we know. But with the new Outback, the system doesn’t just look outwards, it also looks at the driver.
And that’s where it goes wrong, because a few seconds of not looking in front of you and you’ve already got a beeping warning – whether you want to keep paying attention. Sometimes rightly so, usually blood irritating. The Lane Keeping Aid keeps you constantly pushing between the lines, even if you don’t want to. To turn it off, you have to go deep into the menus on the already complicated and very cluttered touchscreen. And you have to do that every time; turn the car off and on again and the stuff is active again. Very disturbing.
CVT automatic
When driving, everything stays the same in the Subaru Outback. Fairly firm damping and fairly soft suspension, for example, so that it leans firmly in turns and crosswinds will rarely escape you. Anyway, you always drive an Outback calmly. If only to avoid the whine of the CVT automatic transmission, which in any case ensures that there never seems to be any correspondence between the actions of the engine and your right foot. Indeed, we are not fans.
It’s a pity that Subaru misses the mark so much with all the electronics and doesn’t seem to care about anything else. With this Outback, the company most resembles the brontosaurus quietly munching while watching the meteorite approaching him. ‘Will run loose’, you see him thinking.