At first I was worried. You see, the doors sounded too good.
A Subaru Impreza is the complete opposite of the Mercedes G-Wagen. People buy this truck against all good sense, knowing full well that it’s too much for what they need, too big and too tall and too thirsty and too flashy. But they buy it because the moment they walk in and close the door…thanks– the outside world closes. Bank vaults sound less reassuring than the doors of a G-Wagen.
Raphael Orlove
The doors of a typical Impreza? They couldn’t sound smaller. Lighter and more fragile. You slump into the fabric seat, smiling. The world invades you. You are barely a speck of dust. So small and insignificant, floating effortlessly over the road, or gravel, or snow, or mud. Nothing can hold you back. You’re not burning gas in a Ram, and yet you’re getting to the same places and probably hauling more stuff, too. The Impreza is open. The Impreza is potential, and nothing more.
Raphael Orlove
At least that’s how Imprezas have been. It’s a new model, and Subaru insists its new chassis is stiffer than the old, more robust one. The welding is better, and the structure more reinforced, and everything is made from better steel so that the chassis itself is lighter than the one it replaces. (The car as a whole weighs about a hundred pounds more than the outgoing automatic Imprezas, ending up around 3171 pounds for the Base and 3275 pounds for the RS.) Worst of all, the doors rattle… well! Pretty much what you could call solid! So has it lost its charm? After all, it has lost its manual transmission, completely gone from all variants of the Impreza. The base model? CVT. The sports model? CVT. The freshly returned naturally aspirated 2.5-litre 2.5 RS? CVT! There’s not even an analog handbrake so you can pull sideways on unpaved exits. You have to get a WRX for any kind of action.
Raphael Orlove
I worried that this louder-sounding Impreza had lost some of its innocence, some of its carefree attitude. Before I could weigh his full vibration, I was shocked. The stiffer chassis could have made it terribly beefier, but it also allowed Subaru engineers to make the springs softer. Even in this 2.5 RS I was surprised. This car is comfortable. It’s strangely nice to be in, especially on a bumpy, twisty, undulating mountain road. My driving partner, Emmet White, from our partner publication Car week, at first we wondered if it was just this particular stretch of well-paved road that Subaru chose for us to drive. But then we both took our own route, far from where we were supposed to go. You see, we had a mission. We had to find Tulare Lake.
Subaru
Tulare Lake was once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. It was so big that people took steamboats to cross it. It was big enough to have islands. Was larger than the Great Salt Lake and has been dry since 1899, drained by canals, feeding the booming agriculture and population of the young state.
Subaru
After years of drought, California had record rainfall this winter. Still seeing record snow, passing 700 inches at Mammoth on the day of our trip. Atmospheric rivers poured over California and ghostly Tulare Lake reappeared.
I googled and it was 80 miles from where Subaru intended us to be, and given the historic nature of the moment, I politely asked if they didn’t mind two car writers disappearing with one of their vehicles for a few hours. it was hard to go back and forth. With a quick yes, we clambered inside.
Subaru
Our beautiful winding roads in the short mountains of the Coast Range straightened out as we drove, ducking behind a very confident local on a Suzuki Aerio SX as they passed car after car. We gave up hope of a view as we crossed I-5 into the incomparably flat San Joaquin Valley. Tulare Lake was around here, somewhere. Emmet had been checking the news on his phone as he drove, hoping to find some street name, some detail we could pin down. The only other vehicles on these bumpy, bumpy roads were trucks. The Impreza soaked it all up, even when we swerved over rough dirt embankments. What I said earlier about the springs on this car being softer is not just a minor tweak. This is a really comfortable vehicle, a bit more luxurious than any of the other new economy cars I’ve driven. On those twisty mountain roads, it was fun, turning and diving into corners, making the car’s slow 182 hp and 178 lb-ft of torque exciting. (We wondered how sluggish the 152-hp Base and Sport would be, though Subaru didn’t carry any.) Here on the flats, it was just plain comfortable.
Raphael Orlove
Subaru warned us that it has made this Impreza more and less “all-wheel drive” than the car it replaces. Mechanically, the entire all-wheel-drive system is very similar to the last-generation car, only tuned to lock up a little less, to be more open. It has loosened the operation of the central differential. According to Garrick Goh, head of product planning for Subaru’s car line, it’s to make the car corner better, hold a line better and feel more nimble. More like a car, less like a truck. Subaru also claims that the car can transfer power more quickly to the front or rear of the car, but maintained that this was not the result of making any of the components lighter or less durable. It has a new, more powerful oil pump for the CVT and the viscous center differential, which is quicker to mix the power.
Whatever the physical or digital changes to the car, there wasn’t enough bumpy ground, no loose dirt to get in the way of our ride. We may or may not have made a donut or two on a farm road leading to a dike, but that’s no real demerit.
Raphael Orlove
Eventually Emmet moved on to check for road closures in the area and after a little helpful pointing from a team of very cool California Department of Transportation workers blocking our way, we finally found it.
Raphael Orlove
At first there wasn’t much to see of Tulare Lake. We just followed a ditch to the north, surprised that it went to the top of its drainage channels. And then the water was just coming up the side of the road. Further, more water. Beyond that, in the middle of this valley, still water. As far as we could see, we were surrounded by him. I noted that an airport appeared on the car’s on-screen map. We saw its roof attached to the surface. Not much more.
Raphael Orlove
Then it consumed us. The water has spilled from west to east, over the road completely, dripping down the embankment to our right. Fortunately, the car was forged there, just like the F-150s and F-250s around us. We stopped to take pictures on a dirt landing, the reformed lake penciled in our tires. I worried for a moment that we might get stuck out here, that the ground might be saturated and thick, and a cautious tap from a passing truck advised us of the same. But I needn’t have worried. The dirt was dry enough, the Impreza moved without hesitation and we left as easily as we arrived. No one had to make any awkward calls to Subaru because we had lost one of their new cars in a lake that hasn’t existed in over a century.
Raphael Orlove
It was the best kind of road trip, sweet and spontaneous. An Impreza type of driving. We weren’t worried about the gas. Even driving as hard as we could imagine, we couldn’t get the MPG below 24 and the car has a 16.6 gallon tank. We had room for anything we might need, the car’s new infotainment system paired our phones and directions with ease, Andre Nickatina blasted through the speakers with aplomb, and handled any kind of excursion without asphalt that we could throw at him. More than that, it was the kind of car that made us want to do this kind of driving. There are sharper cars to drive, even with this Impreza’s new dual-pinion power steering rack (not the same as the WRX’s but similar, Subaru says), and there are cars with sleeker interiors. The Honda Civic is probably both of those things. I don’t know if this car has the same spark as this Subaru. A Corolla certainly not.
There is another interesting thing that has happened with this generation of Impreza. No more sedans. Subaru claimed the take rate for the latest generation hatchbacks was around 75 percent. It no longer made sense to sell the box of three.
The Impreza knows what to do; it is becoming niche. As much as anyone, Subaru knows that a Corolla makes more sense on paper. A Corolla Hybrid gets 50 miles per gallon combined. In the real world, it can give you double what you get in an Impreza. (Base and Sport Imprezas rate 27/34/30, while the RS manages 26/33/29. The CVT keeps revs low on the highway, and we barely hit 2100 RPM at about 70 mph .) People don’t need basic cars to have AWD.
But Americans are less and less attracted to basic cars. The new base Impreza starts at $23,000 with destination. That’s a couple grand cheaper than a Civic five-door, and still a couple grand cheaper than the Civic sedan, too. The average price of a new car in this country is over $48,000 Kelley Blue Book. Around here, you go for a niche, or you don’t go there at all.
So I wish Subaru would embrace that niche a little more. Wish we still had a handbrake, a manual transmission. I wish this car had a little more thug character. But would you want any of these features to cost even more, with even worse fuel economy? I’m not so sure.
Somehow, I was there at this launch just in case. After all, this is a new Impreza. Something I could be drastically different about it. Maybe the infotainment system would be bugged as hell. Maybe the trip would be horrible. Maybe the engine would sound so loud on the freeway it gave me a migraine, or the fuel economy would be so bad that my gas card receipt would cause a riot in the accounting department. But none of that happened. The new Impreza was like the old one, only a little less ugly and a lot more comfortable. It still has its distinctive gargle at the sound of the sink, it still has all-wheel drive and it still has an upright and practical design. I’m so glad it’s still being made.
