AVOIDING FLAT CHAT
SILENCE-KEEP ASSIST: UNOFFICIAL APP OF DEPENDABLE SUBIE
IF THERE’S ONE thing that fills me with terror on a road trip, it’s the thought of having to sustain conversation for hours on end. To mitigate any possibility of this nightmare scenario, I always make sure I have a failsafe back-up plan for music sources. In the Forester there’s the DAB radio, of course, and my phone is plugged in to provide Spotify via Carplay. But just in case the Telstra network melts down, Chernobyl style, I also keep my trusty ipod Classic plugged into the auxiliary port.
Then I remembered the two small red LED lights on the Forester’s centre stack, there to highlight the CD slot – yet another music source! I’d been remiss in not bothering to assess this quaint laserbased relic that dates back to the ’80s, so to redress this, I’d stashed a handful of ’90s banger discs in the glovebox.
As my partner and I headed south
for a weekend away on the coast, I felt comfortable that the music situation was well in hand, and there’d be no awkward silences, or protracted chats about our ‘future as a couple’.
As we settled into a hushed highway cruise, I unclipped a gleaming disc from its case, only to be met with a surprised look from my partner, as if I’d just put on a trilby hat. “Gosh – feeling a bit retro, are we?” she asked.
Fact is, the Forester’s CD player sounds fantastic – it destroys DAB radio and Spotify for fidelity – but it did make me wonder: if yesterday’s state-of the-art digital music storage format is today’s shiny, acrylic-disc landfill, how future-proofed is the fifth-gen Forester?
In terms of safety systems, I’d say brilliantly. I always kept the lane-keep assist switched off, but otherwise the driver aids worked well, with the blindspot warning both bright and
intelligent in its judgement. The crosstraffic alert has been continually useful, and having AEB for reverse did actually save me from contact with a low post one night while squeezing into a tight spot.
But it was the powertrain’s slight lack of sparkle that was the one core element that stops me short of full effusiveness for the Forester, and it’s this that will be addressed with the e-boxer powertrain set to become available early next year.
This hybrid set-up pairs a 110kw/188nm 2.0-litre flat-four with a rear-mounted 10kw/65nm motor powered by a 13.5kwh lithium-ion battery pack. It’s a conventional hybrid, like the RAV4, not a plug-in, but according to overseas reports, it makes a significant difference to three key areas: low-speed responsiveness, quietness, and reduced consumption.
They’re the Forester’s three slight
Achilles, so good work, Subie. On the latter, particularly, I’d have to say my experience was acceptable, rather than brilliant. Our average consumption, very heavily urban biased, was 10.3L/100km, which is 28 percent above the 7.4L/100km ADR combined-cycle figure. The car’s comfortable urban range was around 480km per tank, but we easily added another 100km on the highway, which was plenty.
The bigger ownership cost, of course, is depreciation, but it’s here that the Forester is a strong performer. Now, this info differs depending on the source, and is far from watertight, but financial services group Canstar rates the Subie one of its top five depreciation beaters, losing between 24 and 31 percent in the first three years. So if we were to assume I owned the car for that period, and we took 30 percent as our number, and assumed depreciation was on a linear scale (which we know it’s not, but never mind) it would lose $13,500 of its (haggled) driveaway price of around $45,000. That averages out to $4500 per year, which puts Forester owner comfortably ahead of those with less robust depreciators that carry a similar driveaway price.
So as the Forester rolls out of the Wheels garage for the last time, it will go down as probably the greatest slowburn long-termer I’ve run, wedging its way into our affections via its mostly thoughtful design, brilliant visibility, pliant ride, and generally versatile, super-likeable nature. And a quality audio system that makes conversation highly overrated.