Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
All we’ll drive in our family
BUYING a car – the second biggest investment of your life, after your house – is not something to be taken lightly. And for someone like I, who has testdriven most of the cars on the market, it should have been easy.
That it ended up being one of the most complicated purchasing decisions I have yet made surprised me.
Those of you who are familiar with what I write know I love Subarus – I am what my colleague Jesse Adams disparagingly calls a “fan boy”.
So it should surprise no one that I decided to buy another Subaru. The brand has the highest return purchase percentage in South Africa and many owners are Subaru evangelists, so I am in good company.
However, we still did a needs analysis and looked at what we wanted from a car.
It is something I would advise everyone to do.
It will ensure you don’t get carried away with a cute design or colour and then find the boot is not big enough or, even worse, you get stuck because you believed the advert claims that it is an adventure vehicle,
Over the years, in our own and test Subarus, we have had a lot of fun on gravel roads and tracks and the Forester has taken us to places normally the preserve of hard-core 4x4s. You can’t do that in any other vehicle in its category with the same degree of confidence.
However, the new Forester was not the clear winner for us, especially not when we looked at its smaller sibling, the XV.
This is a funky Impreza hatchback-based vehicle which has a 2.0litre 110kW engine and is very good off-road , but didn’t quite have the space we wanted.
I had imagined that I would opt for the 2.0- litre manual transmission version, which has the same engine and gearbox as the XV. I am also a manual person and the 2.0X Forester is closest to what my old Forester is. The 2.0-litre (with six-speed manual box, as opposed to my five speed) is also amazingly economical for a permanent AWD car: I achieved 6.5 litres per 100km on my highway test route. I also did not see myself as a person who drives an automatic, especially a CVT (Continuously Variable Trans- mission), which is the only option in the bigger- engined, 2.5 litre Foresters. Subaru makes the best CVT around and its behaviour is pretty close to that of a normal automatic. A revised 2.5- litre “boxer” (flat-four) engine now puts out 126kW, in comparison to the 112kW of the 2004 model.
The internal changes include a cam chain (which makes maintenance far less expensive) and reduced friction components which make the car more economical.
I found my Forester better than any similar AWD vehicle; the new ones, though, are now often as good as, or better in some cases, than their 2-wheel-drive competitors.
In the end, after a few weeks of thought, it boiled down to two Foresters: the entry-level 2.5X or the next trim level up, the 2.5 XS.
The more expensive one had the fancy wheels, the toys and, so I thought, Subaru’s amazing XMode system, which co-ordinates engine output, traction control and brake functions to maximise traction in tricky situations.
In the end, we opted for the cheaper car, and I was prepared to live without the X-Mode, so, you could have literally knocked me down with a feather when I collected our new car – and saw the XMode button just ahead of the gear lever.
I now know that all Subarus with the CVT system come equipped with X-mode which gives me, as the Subaru marketing slogan says, “Confidence in Motion”.
And Subaru is currently offering a 5-year/ 120 000km plan on XVs and Foresters.
This car works for me on the levels of head and heart: its engineering solutions are innovative and it drives like nothing else on the road.
It has confirmed to me that there are two types of drivers: Those who drive a Subaru and those disadvantaged individuals who don’t.