Jason on Cars

I was excited to drive the all-new 2008 Impreza 4-door sedan. Recently, a friend of mine had driven WRXs and STIs through the frozen tundra of the Yukon Territory of Canada. He raved about it’s performance, on-snow driving, and how fun it was to rally those cars through breathtaking scenery. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t have the opportunity to take it through such dramatic landscapes, nor was I driving the sport-packed engines of the WRX or STI.

The introductory price of my Impreza was $17,000 and includes a 170-hp engine that is unfortunately under-powered. With such a rich heritage of rally car champions, getting into a Subaru and feeling the sluggish, unresponsive weight of the throttle disappointed much more than when driving an even more under-powered car but from a lesser pedigree. And as I remembered from driving Imprezas past, the seats were firm and uncomfortable. The final negative was the car looked and felt very cheap inside. The first glance around the cockpit revealed plastic-looking and feeling levers, knobs, and dash panels that aren’t inappropriate for an entry-level car, but again, with such a rich heritage of making great cars, it was disappointing to see how cheap this Subaru was.

My first experience with station wagons came as a result of watching, over and over again, National Lampoon’s Vacation (the original and still my favorite). Clark is taking the kids across the country with aunt Edna strapped to the roof of the family truckster. Big, green, with wood-paneled sides; I feel this car is the quiet, true winner of Most Under-Whelming Car of All-Time. Leap forward 20 years and the wagon has seen some serious change, both in performance and public image. At least in the Northwest, Subaru’s Outback is synonymous with greatness, featuring one of the largest cargo areas in the way-way back, lots of leg room in the rear seats, and standard all-wheel handling. It’s somewhere between rally car and family truckster, with a dash of mountain-biking cool thrown in for good measure.

I’ve heard in Texas people don’t really care about Subarus, but in Oregon, these are the cars people drive. As someone who’s grown up mountain biking and snowboarding, for the past 15 years my friends have driven pretty much every possible configuration of Subaru wagon made. And each year, they get a little nicer, a little more refined, and a little more revered in “adventure sport’” lifestyles. Myself, I’ve always appreciated the Outback’s tall ride height, its stock use of roof racks and fog lights, tight turning radius, and its ability to drive through any road condition I could throw at it. This test car came with all of that goodness included.

Let�s get it right out in the open. This car looks weird. It is far from elegant and beautiful, far from sleek and sexy, far from what you even think of when you think of Subaru. To put it simply, it�s sort of homely. With that said however, I can�t go so far as to say that it�s ugly, or hideous.

If you look at the right pictures of it, it looks sort of like a mutated CR-V, or a RAV4, slightly stretched and a little higher off the ground. From other angles, it looks more like a Honda Odyssey or some other as-close-to-a-minivan-without-actually-being-a-minivan-thing that you can get. In my opinion, it�s the backend that�s the most unforgiving, like some sort of alien Cyclops.

Once inside, it plays the same story over again. Not an especially elegant interior, but not necessarily offensive either. It feels a little over-designed actually, and in some cases, there are some things that are so different that you almost feel that they made it unique just to be different, not to be better. The dials are easy to read, but not always presented in an intuitive fashion, the temperature controls are nice with integrated temp displays inside the rotating temperature knob, and the navigation system has a touch screen.