However, with a 23 year old vehicle, a person does start to think about a replacment. My candidates at this point are Subaru or Toyota. It is a mystery to me why American automakers don't make quality vehicles, but they don't. And I don't let some misplaced notions of "patriotism" influence me towards buying any of their junk. I fundamentally have 3 candidates:
Before we get into the thick of this, let's look at some prices
(manufacturer MSRP). Note that through much of 2022, supply shortages
had dealers jacking up prices by as much as $20,000 in a shameless
exploitation of their customers, calling this a "delivery fee" or
some such. Subaru stood solidly against this, telling their dealers
that this sort of thing would not be acceptable. You have to give
them several gold stars for this kind of behavior.
Here is a list in order of increasing price.
You might think that I would want this given my interest in 4x4 performance. Unfortunately Subaru makes a bad mistake and insists on including a more powerful turbo-charged engine as part of this package, sacrificing fuel economy. As any experienced 4x4 driver knows, engine power is almost never an important asset. Clearance is the most important thing by far, followed by available torque, which an be delivered at the wheels by almost any engine given proper gearing. So, I'll save money and avoid the wilderness if I do decide on a Subaru Outback.
To my surprise, the wilderness Forester does not make the turbo mistake (this is limited to the Outback) and this makes the Wilderness a valid and interesting option. So what does the Forester wilderness offer? More than I imagined, but you do pay an additional $5000 for all of this (and the following may not be a complete list):
Both have 8.7 inches of ground clearance (9.5 for the wilderness outback and 9.2 for the wilderness forester). The Outback is 9.2 inches longer and 250 pounds heavier. Particularly worth noting is that the Outback has a 5 inch longer wheelbase which will sacrifice offroad performance. Both offer essentially identical room for passengers, but the Outback offers a bit more cargo space (32.5 cubic feet versus 26.9 with rear seats in use).
Both have the same 2.4 liter 4 cylinder engine and give 26/33 mpg. (This drops to 25/28 mpg for the turbo wilderness model). This is city/highway.
What about sleeping room? I read a fellow saying he is 6'2" and he can sleep fine in his Forester when he pushes the front seats fully forward and stuffs something into the gap between the rear seat headrests and the front seats. They spec the "cargo space seats down" as 5'9" for the Forester and 6'3" for the Outback. This is an extra 6 inches and makes sense given the overall vehicle is 9.2 inches longer.
And finally, there is overall "look". The outback looks long and sleek while the forester looks more boxy. Looking at them I get the feeling the Forester might have more headroom, but this would be something to judge in a test drive. The same goes for visibility. I have read people saying that the Forester has much better visibility. Again, something to try to evaluate in a test drive.
The "wilderness" package on the Forester sacrifices some gas economy. The numbers for the wilderness Forester are 25/28/26 as compared to 26/33/29 for the regular model. This is largely due to gear ratio changes (optimizing low speed torque and sacrificing the ability to run at highway speeds with lower rpm).
I had the opportunity in early April of 2023 to bounce around on some dirt roads in a new (2023) Forester my buddy just purchased. This was a premium edition vehicle, not a wilderness. We first went to one trailhead that many passenger cars would not be able to get to and it got there easily and was not challenged in the least. Next we drove to a campspot we had used previously up on a ridge top that had me using 4x4 in my Tacoma. It got us there easily without any trouble. This was a surprise to me, as I entirely expected to encounter a bad section and need to turn around. Lastly we drove down a road we should not have and encountered a washout that had us biting our lip and sweating. We got out, walked it, and indentified a line, then my friend drove it. It pushed the Forester to the limit. At one point two wheels (front left and right rear) were off the ground by an inch and spinning. The answer was to roll back a bit and get a bit of speed to carry through that spot. Clearance was not an issue. I would have been on edge even with my Tacoma.
All in all the Subaru Wilderness significantly exceeded my expectations for what it would do. I expected the AWD to be the sort of thing that was intended to get a soccer mom to a game in snowy conditions. It is much more than that.
It also has a multitude of fancy features that I don't yet fully understand. It would hold our speed automatically on descents, and this X-mode promises things that we may not have tapped. It did not save the day when we had a wheel off the ground, but we may not have known how to properly use it.
I have long been a skeptic of automatic transmissions in offroad vehicles. This was my first "first hand" experience of an automatic transmission in offroad use. I may be persuaded that they will do just fine. My bias towards manual transmissions may need to be relegated to nostalgia. Not only that, the transmission in the Subaru is not the automatic transmission I have grown up with, but their CVT design with the X-mode on top of it, which deserves to be evaluated entirely on its own.
In good weather, I enjoy sleeping in the bed of my current 2000 Tacoma. If I got a new Tacoma, I would probably get it with a "real back seat" and sacrifice the nearly 6 foot bed. This would change all of this "sleep in the bed" thinking. One line of thought then would be that if you are going to make that change, just go the "whole hog", ditch the bed altogether and go with the Forerunner.
The huge plus of the Forerunner over the Tacoma is security. On a long trip, having your gear out of the sun, dirt, dust, weather, and away from thieving hands would be a luxury.
Tom's Auto repair pages / [email protected]