Could it get any better?
Better than it’s ever been, better than anything out there
When it arrives this fall, the new Subaru Forester will be the best compact crossover on the market you can get. The familiar styling and other low-key specs hide the Foresters true form as one of the best products that Subaru or any of its competitors has put out in quite some time.
It’s a culmination of a number of factors: a brand new 2.5-litre engine finds its home, a new transmission, new driving modes, a new platform and an important new driver safety feature that puts everyone else to shame.
The top safety app
I want to start with that specifically, the newly available DriverFocus system, that sticks a driver-focused camera with facial recognition in the cabin of the vehicle. After registering your face with the system, it can set up the cabin to your liking, arranging the seats, mirrors and climate control to your liking. It can be registered for five users, which is far more than the 2 or 3 memory seat settings that most cars have, but in reality, this part of DriverFocus is just a convenience gimmick, the true benefit is that the system can tell when the driver is fatigued or distracted and bring them back to the task at hand.
In the worst case scenario, the system works in collaboration with Subaru’s EyeSight safety suite, and will preload features such as automatic braking to prevent an accident caused by the distracted driver. This can help prevent so many accidents, needless injuries and deaths, especially as driver assistance features like an adaptive cruise with stop and go capabilities, lane keep assistance and rear automatic braking become more common, and drivers lose touch with the weight of their responsibilities on the road. Features like DriverFocus aren’t just useful, they’re practically nec- essary these days, and to see it in one of Subaru mainstream models, the Forester underlines that fact.
It’s the killer app of the car, and it shows just how far Subaru has come, as it offers a feature that’s currently found only on the flagship Cadillac CT6 that costs more than $90,000. Consider that the Forester will cost less than half of that, features standard all-wheel drive, 2,155 L of storage and it’s pretty easy to see what makes the Forester so impressive, but nothing comes close to impressing more than the safety features, which makes the brand’s track record with the IIHS so impressive, where almost every vehicle in the lineup has scored a Top Safety Pick or better rating.
Efficient with space and comfort
But other aspects of the car are solid too. Take the engine, for example, a newly minted 2.5-litre four-cylinder boxer, that has a lot in common with the 2.0litre engine found in the Crosstrek and Impreza. It makes 12 more horsepower and 2 more lb-ft of torque than the outgoing 2.5 and the total figure of 182 horsepower means that the Forester looks pretty comparable to its closest rivals in that sense. The new transmis- sion has some say in allowing the Forester to be more responsive and fuel friendly, with a wider spread of ratios. Finally, Subaru has improved the engine thermal management system of the car, which will bring the engine up to temperature much quicker, which will again provide benefits in both comfort and efficiency.
Another interesting tweak has been added to the Foresters climate control system which can use the airbag sensors to determine whether passengers are on board. If the front passenger and rear passenger spots are empty, the climate control system won’t provide conditioning to those areas, which improves efficiency.
The rest of the cabin has been designed with more comfort in mind. It’s designed without too much flair or drama, looking more like the Crosstrek but with better materials and seats. There are more padded soft-touch materials found at key touch points like where knees and elbows would bang plastic panels, which means the Forester would be more comfortable when cruising with your hands out the window.