“Love. It’s What Makes A Subaru, A Subaru.” If you’ve watched a YouTube video or any TV you almost certainly know about Subaru’s memorable marketing campaign. Subaru wants you to think that people keep returning to its dealers because of all of the things people love that they can associate with their cars, be it charity, pets, safety, or adventure. Unless your name is Matt Hardigree, it seems like there’s a lot of love for Subaru.
But is it real? Is it just marketing? As Matt wrote last week, data shows that Subaru isn’t really the best at anything, but that doesn’t really matter. The brand has devoted fans, which is fine! TheCoryJihad gives one explanation:
As someone who used to work in a Subaru store, I can fully say that it is a cult on the level of Volvo and Saab. In fact, we traded a fair number of late model Volvos on new Outbacks and Ascents on a shocking scale. We were also cross-shopped with Volvo more than any other brand, even when similar sized vehicles had a $10k pricing discrepancy.
The owners were all well monied, high credit, highly educated and typically knew all about the brand’s commitment to animal and conservation charities.
I’ve worked for Honda, Hyundai, Chevrolet, Nissan, Kia, Lincoln and Ford, but none of those brands come close to the level of love that Subaru owners genuinely feel towards that brand.
As does Alexander Moore:
Easy. Subaru sells cars how we remember them. Slow, low windowlines with lots of glass, decent ground clearance, and relatively comfortable. In contrast many other brands are going all-in on sporty styling, stiff suspensions, and gunslit DLOs. I think marketers are totally out of touch and don’t realize that most people just want the same car they already have, only slightly nicer and newer. They don’t want something totally radical and different.
Jason wrote about how his legendary ‘Marshall’ Ford truck is back on the road. In that piece, he jokes that he’s never been invited to lunch by a deer. Chronometric makes a funny point:
You might get invited to a deer luncheon if you stopped driving into their kinfolk.
A. Barth:
“I was just standing there, minding my own business, and PAO!!”
Chronometric again:
Bambi, are you hurt?
No, but I’m not O-Kei.
Mike Harrell made me laugh too much with this one:
But rocks are dense! Dense and heavy.
Among the more valuable lessons I learned in grad school is never to offer to help a geologist move. It ends up being mostly boxes of rocks and boxes of books about rocks.
In my case, also car parts, but that really doesn’t help matters.
I also have the answers to last week’s Only Fanbelts. If you’re a member, we showed you a bunch of 2024 music rewinds and asked you to match them to the author. The answers are:
1. Thomas
2. Matt
3. Mark
4. Griffin
5. David
6. Me
7. Jason
That’s right, I spent most of my year listening to German symphonic metal bands, some Linkin Park, and a lot of bro-country. For that last part, I was really into songs about trucks.
Have a great evening, everyone!
“The owners were all well monied, high credit, highly educated and typically knew all about the brand’s commitment to animal and conservation”
Describes my neighborhood to a “T” well monied may be an exageration but in income brackets where they could drive fancier than Subaru. Yet in nearly every two car garage sits a Subaru. Mostly outbacks, but a little bit of everything.
We have a Crosstrek, I have to say after driving the competition we were smitten, it feels different, slightly lifted wagon instead of an SUV (mostly I think because it felt wider and less tall than the others). My wife loved it and that was that (I didn’t really want a car with a CVT, we keep our cars a long time).
They fill a niche, they are different enough in both feel, specs (boxer engine) and marketing to appeal to people who want to feel like they have something a little special, but not pretentious or bro-macho.
Long way of saying, yeah, this generation’s Volvo/Saab.
I have nothing against Subaru cars themselves. They’re simply “car”. It’s Subaru wagon owners I can’t stand because they’re all horrible drivers. These are non-enthusiast types. We call them road blocks in the mountains because they’ll get in the passing lane on winding passes and sit next to the semis.
The enthusiast types are different. They’re effectively VW people with extra axles.
It’s not that they are purposely pacing the semis – the passing power offered by the N/A boxer engine is feeble.
We had a winter beater ’07 Forester before Covid that turned into a 3 year vehicle because of used car pricing.
Pros – view like a greenhouse, perfect size (it’s a boxy wagon), absolutely amazing AWD and road stability in general even with garbage tires on it (symmetrical design is real along with the boxer having evenly distributed low weight), never had a showstopper problem with it, and the person I bought it from swore they had never done a head gasket on it so I was ready.
Cons – frameless windows were moronic (loud, caused the mirror gaskets to warp and leak air, etc unless you wrenched them back into place every so often), road noise was not insignificant, mpg isn’t great, the engines are LOUD when warming up in the cold, it wept oil from both sides of the engine gaskets, constant CEL due to O2 sensor data mismatch (most people just add a $2 spacer to “fix”), and basically everything on that car was rusty. Meanwhile my ’07 Vibe has led essentially the same life and only has the normal NE rust on stuff like suspension parts and whatnot.
In short, it was an unkillable POS with great AWD. My wife absolutely loved it.
I’m not sure I would ever want another, especially now that they’re all CVTs.
Ive owned 5 Subarus, 2 Foresters 3 WRX/Sti I gravitated to them because they were fun and still affordable. I hated that every other car on the road was a Toyota or Honda and wanted Japanese AWD and different. I never had any issues with them that people on the internet gripe about, granted I only kept the Foresters long enough to have over 60k miles on them. I would pretend I couldnt see the ugly cladding and buy a WRX over anything else in its price range today if I didnt go up market and stick to mostly Germans over the last few years. I will be searching for a Subaru in a couple years when my kids hit driving age for their cars.
I’m leasing a Crosstrek right now, and I definitely have mixed feelings. Objectively, the car is great. Drives good, handles bad pavement and dirt roads great. But it has no soul. I think that might largely be the CVT, but blah.
Anyone know if you can manual swap a 24 Crosstrek Wilderness? Or how long until I am not upside down on my 3 year lease?
You could absolutely swap a manual onto that FB25. The issue would be the complexity of deleting the eyesight system and all of the other electric nannies, and getting the car to work properly. There are multiple people out there that have done WRX and STi drivetrain swaps into Imprezas and Crosstreks, but they’ve all started with base manual Crosstreks and Imprezas afaik due to the lack of eyesight and simplicity of the harnesses in comparison.
It can definitely be done on the wilderness, but would be pretty intense and expensive. The 6-speed from the SJ chassis Foresters bolts up perfectly if you were curious.
Selling used Subarus… They are junk. I’ve sold hundreds and they almost always come back with repairs. For a very long time every Subaru would have its head gaskets blow every 60,000 miles. So then again at 120,000 and again at 180,000. Can you imagine what would happen to Ford or GM if their cars did this so consistently? Toyota or Honda?!
Subaru buyers don’t buy extended warranties and then their cars are riddled with problems. Then they want the dealership to pay for repairs months or even years later. In my experience, Fords are much, much more reliable long term and short term than Subaru.
Subarus go through windshields more than any other car with cheap windshields. Ask your windshield guy how he feels about Subarus! He probably loves them, though.
Subarus get worse hail damage than any other car with thin body panels. All of our dealerships had a few cars after a hail storm that needed help. Every single Subaru in sales or service needed to be done on every upward panel. Ask your friendly neighborhood paintless dent repair professional his thoughts on Subaru!
Subaru USA may care about the world and the planet, but Subaru’s parent company, Fuji Heavy Industries, has a problem with hiring gray market labor (above slave, but not by much) in Japan and pay them less than Japanese minimum wage.
Industry folks all think of Subaru as a joke in terms of the actual product. It is not on the level of Toyota or even GM in terms of quality…Yet, people believe in them. If you go to a Subaru dealership, you will see that the majority of people who work there don’t drive them and if they do they have a Solterra or a BRZ, which are Toyotas.
When someone with a Subaru pulls up to a dealership, salespeople typically remark “just wait they forgot their clipboard!” or “Their clipboard must be in the trunk.”
Subarus are like astrology. It doesn’t matter if their reputation is true or not (it’s not), what matters is that people believe in them.
Some of this is a bit hyperbolic though.
Maybe at the dealership they were still using poor gaskets because they insisted on the OEM supplier each time, but our mechanic in town loved Subies and would replace the gasket with an aftermarket one – that was always the last headgasket that car ever needed.
He was a weird dude and I used to give him PCs to use from time to time (karaoke and Alldata), so he’d talk my ear off about his latest Subie. Plus my friend and his mom both had Subarus that only ever got the one aftermarket gasket and then each went to well over 150k miles. One rusted out, the other (an ’02) is still driving.
The other thing you didn’t mention is that their AWD system is unique and top notch. Full time real AWD with meaningful ability to transfer power to places, plus a low center of gravity and equal half-shafts. There’s a reason you see Subarus all over the NE and snow belt areas. It’s not just a cult of personality and advertising.
For as much as I dislike them from a reliability standpoint (especially now with all CVTs), they are traction beasts.
Our Subaru with nearly shot tires was infinitely better in the snow than my FWD vehicle with brand new wheels.
I don’t think they’re anywhere in contention at being the best of the best of cars. That’s not to say I think they’re all bad.
I actually recommend the new Subaru Crosstrek Wilderness to people because it’s a great value at its price. Seriously if Subaru made a Crosstrek Wilderness Turbo that would be a compelling vehicle.
Just sayin’… They get a pass for a lot of stuff that others wouldn’t get a pass for. One could argue that this says more about us than it does the actual Subaru vehicles.
Your first sentence was “Selling used Subarus… They are junk.” That’s pretty damning.
Unless you meant only USED Subarus, I’m not sure how you’d get from that sentiment to either “they’re not all bad” or “I actually recommend the Crosstrek Wilderness”.
Considering how much trouble Subaru had with the Forester XT turbos, I’d be wary to try another turbo 2.5 (or whatever they run these days) from them. Also CVT….. blech.
Still, I think you can make worse “popular” purchasing decisions than Subaru for reliability, just look at all the Rogues and Muranos being sold. And arguably some of the Stellantis/Jeep stuff. Hell, even Toyota is rolling out some impressive mechanical failures right now!
I was in an abusive relationship with Subaru for many years. Never again!
I had 3 Subarus in a row:
I liked them because:
Now that they offer no more manuals in anything with a hatch, I stopped buying them. If they ever bring back a WRX hatch, I might become a customer again.
I could be convinced to ignore the stupid cladding on the WRX if it came in a hatch. Hell, Why they don’t offer 2 flavors of WRX hatch in a street and trail (impreza and crosstrek) is beyond me.
So according to the YouTuber Sara N Tuned, the thing to do is get one of the final year Legacy Turbo sedans and manual swap it — she says a WRX 6 speed will plug and play right in. Would make a heck of a sports sedan.
Sarah has great reviews with a lot of technical data. Plus she has personality without being annoying.
Besides all of that, where else are you getting a Penguin score for every vehicle?!?
Her and the Car Care Nut do a great (but different) job reviewing vehicles.
Like your taste in music Mercedes. Though that truck song has to be a parody, right? I know there’s a lot of trucks in country music, but those lyrics seem like something I’d see on SNL.
I don’t think anyone had any doubt which one of those was Jason.
Pop country music is a parody. The shit that’s popular becomes Applebee’s ad material and no-one bats an eye.
Somehow it’s not a parody! There’s a whole sub-genre (?) of country singers who just love singing about trucks. Here’s another:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS5i_smVfUk
Meh, nothing new. Toby Keith released Big ‘Ol Truck back in 1995 – wow, I feel old.
RAM could probably use her in an ad campaign and increase the sales a good amount. I don’t care for them RAMS, but I believe that girl might could talk me into thinkin’ otherwise.
On the other hand, put her and a friend in flannel shirts and I’d probably double down and buy two Subarus…stranger things have happened.
Didn’t they already have a commercial featuring a girl wailing about having a heart like a truck (vocalized more like “TRRRUUUUUUUUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHHCK”)?
Being old, and brain damage has erased any memory of that.