SUBARU IMPREZA
Subaru scores a gold star for ‘most improved student’
T’S just a phase.” That’s what optimistic parents say when their offspring start listening to Norwegian death metal and dressing in dark colours. “They’ll grow out of it soon.”
Subaru’s Impreza has been through ‘a phase’ of its own in recent years, if a little less dramatic and rebellious than the average metalloving teen. In fact, it’s been the polar opposite.
The Impreza, long associated with gravelspraying Scandinavian flicks and WRC trophies, popped a Valium and mellowed out in 2007 with the GH generation, a safe-as-panadol small car that ditched the quirky design spunk of its predecessor for more sedate sheetmetal, a bland interior and an incredibly dull hatchback silhouette. Yes, there were fast WRX and uberquick WRX STI variants to provide some spice, but they were akin to squeezing a bottle of Sriracha over potato and egg salad.
The formula was corrected slightly when a sedan variant was added, which saw the return of wildly flared fenders and a suitably oversize wing for the STI, but for the following generation, the WRX and STI were shunted onto a different track and divorced from the humdrum Impreza range entirely.
And so the tedium continued. More practical and roomier than ever, but depressingly middle-of-the-road compared to more polished small cars such as the Mazda 3 and Volkswagen Golf. Even Subaru admits the current model lacks appeal. “It’s a boring car, a little
bit,” said Masahiko Inoue, senior project manager for the new Impreza. “For younger buyers, it was not cool.”
Now there’s a totally new Impreza heading for Australia in December. We’ve driven it (briefly) in Japan and our first taste is promising.
First things first: Subaru has addressed the design. Your eyelids won’t get heavy looking at this one, and some complimentary links can be made with Volvo’s handsome V40.
An extensive glasshouse remains an Impreza calling card, though the DLO (daylight opening: a design term meaning “the see-through bits”) has been trimmed and reshaped to give the impression of a lower and longer roof. It’s not just an optical illusion; the new Impreza is 10mm lower and 35mm wider than the current model.
Subaru values vision and the Impreza benefits from fixed front quarter windows for a better view around the wing mirrors and A-pillar, and small portal windows set into the C-pillar to aid over-the-shoulder vision.
Inside, the cabin loses the fairly clinical appearance of the current model and is transformed with greater warmth and better materials. There’s a newfound impression of expense, with switchgear that looks and feels premium, a leather gaiter around the transmission selector, stitched-leather dash surfaces and a flushmounted 8.0-inch colour infotainment touchscreen.
The part-leather, part-cloth upholstery on mid-grade and high-grade models looks and feels classy, and there’s plenty of cushion support – not always a given in modern Subarus. And new Impreza has grown where it counts: 29mm more shoulder room, 20mm more space between the front seats, 29mm extra legroom in the rear, and a boot aperture widened by 100mm.
Android Auto and Apple Carplay come standard across the range, with integrated sat-nav on high-grade variants. Beyond the base model you also score the third generation of Subaru’s ‘Eyesight’ active safety tech, which brings adaptive cruise control, lane-keep assist and autonomous emergency braking.
Subaru acknowledged that this car’s five-year-old predecessor was no dynamic star, with soggy handling and a roll-happy chassis. That’s why its replacement sits on all-new scalable architecture intended to form the basis for all future Subarus (though possibly not BRZ).
The result is a car that’s substantially more rigid, with a claimed 50 percent reduction in body vibrations
and substantially more roll resistance thanks to a rear anti-roll bar bolted directly to the chassis; it’s more time-intensive and costly to manufacture, but Subaru says the pay-off is better body control without having to resort to mega-thick bars.
New Impreza also has a 5mm-lower centre of gravity, and on the twisting circuit (actually a cycling sports complex) in Japan, it displayed surprising stability and agility through fast direction changes.
Steering is accurate and well-weighted, if a touch dead, though it was difficult to assess on a glass-smooth surface free of imperfections (the test track being designed for pushbikes rather than pushing small hatchbacks to their limits).
However, it wasn’t hard to note a profound difference in grip levels between the 17-inch tyres of the midgrade Impreza and the high-grade’s 18-inch rubber. The 205-section Bridgestone Turanzas on the 17s lost grip much earlier than the 225-section Yokohamas on the 18s, revealing the Impreza’s propensity for on-limit understeer. Torque-vectoring on the bigger-wheeled range-topper helps tighten its cornering line.
Impreza’s FB20 2.0-litre flat-four might now be direct-injected, but with just 5kw more power and an unchanged 196Nm, it shows little improvement.
Australia-bound cars will be equipped only with a CVT transmission, which is depressing for anyone who enjoys changing gears themselves. At low speed, Impreza’s CVT is very refined, but when you work the engine harder, there’s some annoying whine from beyond the firewall. At least the CVT tries to mimic a conventional auto when you floor the throttle, moving up through artificially stepped ratios instead of droning endlessly. It also features steering-wheel paddles.
Nevertheless, with no manual ’box and no higheroutput powertrains available in high-spec models, as there is for Golf, 3, Civic, i30, you name it, the new Impreza is left to compete solely at bread-and-butter level. In this regard, it lags well behind its competitors.
That aside, the Impreza experience has changed dramatically, and for the better. It seems the Impreza has grown out of its ‘phase’ after all.