[Music] oo W woo woo [Music] I've been driving the Subaru Outback range for 3 weeks now and I've got to tell you it's one of the most carlike SUVs you're ever likely to drive that's kind of surprising because it's essentially the same size as a Hundai Santa Fe the symmetrical all-wheel drive system well that's excellent but I really think Subaru is got to spend a few few more dollars on Aesthetics and the service interval well that's 6 months that means the new Outback is unlikely to be the most coste effective SUV in terms of its overall operating cost let's go back to the studio and we'll find out if the new Outback is the right next SUV for [Music] you I've driven all three available powertrains for the Subaru Outback the 2 L diesel the 2.5 L petrol 4 and the 3.6 L petrol 6 I spent a week in each one and the vehicles were supplied by Subaru Australia from the company's regular media evaluation Fleet that's the full extent of Subaru's involvement in this review like all my reviews Subaru has no say whatsoever in the comment which is my honest personal assessment if Subaru happens not to like some of my comments I'll add them to the long and distinguished list of car makers in that impotently disgruntled category they can go keep Mercedes Benz and their gay 180 company it probably won't come to that though because I'm pretty impressed by the Outback starting with the core strengths This SUV is just so carlike to drive that's super impressive despite its overall size varying just a few inches one way or the other against key competitors like the Toyota kuga heand Santa Fe and even the Ford territory Outback simply never feels big and ponderous it's good around town and on the freeway where it just feels stable and secure if you believe what those doofuses hey I'm pretty sure it's dofi you know from the Latin meaning more than one doofus look it up anyway those dofi at Mazda call jinba it what now they do it's in every brochure it means when the horse and the rider become as one I think metaphorically don't start anyway for the record I have never wanted to be as one at least not with a horse but if that changes I certainly want to pitch and not catch make a note what I'm trying to say is if you want to jimba itti the crap out of driving then Subaru is pretty good at that with the Outback you just tell the Outback what to do it does that and it does it with reasonable Precision big jinba itai tick thanks a lot for the concept Mazda Outback's pretty chable too if you like a conservatively spirited jinba itai pitching but not catching with Mr Ed on some you know beastiality Back Road Outback has generally excellent driving Dynamics is what I'm trying to say perhaps with my hoof in my mouth another big tick is Subaru's symmetrical all-wheel drive system people think this gives you more grip which is actually what it actually gives you is greater predictability when the road is slippery so you in fact get a more Progressive transition from grip to slip in particular when you're applying power essentially all all four wheels are driving all the time and that means for any given level of overall Tractive effort each wheel delivers half the drive torque compared with the job they do on some of those front drive only SUV competitors symmetrical all-wheel drive is also better than many OnDemand all-wheel drive systems of competitors and on demand systems often take a little bit too long to react and catch up with changes in either the traction underf foot or the driver's acceleration demands symmetrical all-wheel drive is incidentally the fundamental reason why Subaru is a popular mainstream car maker today they used symmetrical all-wheel drive to differentiate themselves from other Japanese car makers it's great engineering and they used that to clamber out of the pool of obscurity and into the motoring mainstream people in Regional Australia who often drive on let's face it fairly dirt roads that haven't been maintained all that often since the Big Bang those people understand intimately the advantages offered by symmetrical all-wheel drive and that's why you see so many Subarus in the bush the other huge Advantage with Outback is eyesight Subaru's proprietary autonomous safety system based on two rangef finding stereoscopic cameras mounted high up in the windscreen here's Subaru Australia A's managing director Nick senior the key thing about eyesight is to try and prevent crashes it has not just come onto uh the radar excuse the pun over the last three or four years eyesight has been 20 years in the making and in the testing but the big advances have happened in the last 5 years it incorporates uh in Subaru's case digital uh stereo cameras to send a range of activities how close you are to the car in front of you whether you are swerving whether there is a tendency that you're getting um a bit drowsy and I think probably in Australia that's a fairly important one given the long distances and the high incidence of driver fatigue and the most common one uh that we have is nose to tail crashes so with eyesight it sensors and then it can uh pre breaking and also break a lot harder to try and at least minimize or if not completely stop accidents so it's a range your six or seven Key activities designed to prevent or help prevent crashes so basically eyesight's big tricks are that safe distance maintaining adaptive cruise control and autonomous emergency braking adaptive cruise and I know you 100 octane in your veins petrol heads already know this but let's assume moment some people are less obsessed with cars than you and they just want to buy one every few years if that's you the distinction between adaptive cruise control and old and busted standard cruise control is that adaptive cruise can sense traffic and slow down for congestion automatically and maintain a safe following distance all the while with the cruise control still engaged which is a pretty cool upgrade if you've never actually tried it like going from Ros o' Donnell to Victoria Beckham kind of thing you also get some other pretty effective safety subsystems and at times you know driving along randomly bored thinking about I don't know Posh Spice a Bowa constrictor and baby oil perhaps there can be a bit of eyesight false alarming going on if false alarming is a verb some drivers get a little bit distracted by that intrusion on their Posh reptile lubricant Flights of Fancy eyesight is annoyingly detaining you with advice about something you've perhaps already seen just bear in mind however that eyesight system has a proclivity to annoy but also importantly to save you from that one time when you have failed to identify serious problem Posh is perhaps saying use more oil just when a kid inconveniently steps out onto the road between two par marked cars and frankly if a handful of false positive reptile Posh pleasurous interruptus events are the price for preventing one day the worst day of either your life or some other poor bastard's life then that's probably a decent ethical exchange don't you think because imaginary Posh and her slippery snake will wait patiently trust me on this she will she won't even be mildly annoyed it's one of life's most enduring ing maxims and realistically if you're on a long drive and you've had six or seven Lane departure eyesight warning events in the space of the past 15 minutes that might be literally a wakeup call that you are too fatigued to be driving a car safely eyesight is a brilliant but somewhat redundantly annoying system it's like I don't know wearing a seat belt usually pointless but when you need it you so profoundly need need it just to make sure if you buy a Subaru with eyesight get that insurance that includes windscreen replacement coverage because reinstalling and re-calibrating that eyesight camera Hardware is not an especially cheap exercise following a broken windscreen the final big Plus in Outback's Arsenal is the price the range in price is from just under 40 Grand to just over $53,000 on the road and that's a lot less than a kuger a Santa Fe a sento a territory and okay in Outback there are only five seats on offer but the overall size is brilliant there's a huge cargo space and the features list is very very impressive on the less brilliant side and there certainly is one of those first and foremost for me is the transmission it's a CVT of which my default setting is I'm not such a fan to be fair Subaru's invested a lot of effort making the CVT in the outback more responsive and engaging than the first generation cvts from many manufacturers but it's still absolutely not as good meaning not as good nor as Progressive and maybe not even as robust as a well sorted conventional automatic transmission and some of that comment is an educated guess in particular the reservation I have about the CVT in Outback is for heavy towing heavyish Towing anyway when you look at the gross fundamentals of this vehicle it's the same size broadly as a Santa Fe or sento and yet it toes only 1,500 kg against the competitors on 2000 it doesn't even match SUVs the next size down like the Mazda CX-5 on 1,700 kg so it's not the size nor the weight nor the performance of the available engines imposing this lower maximum towing limit on the Outback it's the transmission guaranteed so I live on the side of this mountain and my driveway approximates you know the North Face of the Iger people die getting to the summit routinely they sadly never ex wives they live forever anyway the K2 driveway is a great place to investigate the low- speeed loaded up performance of any transmission so I'm backing the Outback up the matorn driveway and it's kind of definitely not happy I've seen happy and not just with a horse or musing Posh and the slippery snake any of that stuff and this driveway reversing experience is definitely not that okay it's not doing it as well as a conventional automatic transmission and I definitely wouldn't want to be backing a trailer boat Caravan loaded with dead bodies whatever up a very Steep Hill in that that kind of situation so if you plan on Towing something heavy meaning close to the Limit meaning if your towed Implement weighs 1,200 kg or more and you plan on doing that regularly I'd be barking up a different SUV Towing tree I'm not so convinced the Outback is the definitive best moderately heavy towing Choice available it also depends how often you intend to do this obviously if it's hundreds or even thousands of kilometers every year I am simply not sold on Outback as a robust moderate to heavy toe platform but what I'm not saying absolutely not saying is to avoid Outback for occasional light Towing taking the box trailer to I don't know bomb makers are us and coming home with a few hundred lers of kerosene and some hydrogen peroxide it's all good light infrequent Towing blow yourself up heavy towing not so sure what no I don't think so everyone who's studied absolutely already knows that the other two areas that Subaru really needs to focus on are Aesthetics and running costs I usually don't comment on styling because a beauty is absolutely in the eye of the beholder I mean look at Amber herd and Johnny Depp and B because people have eyes and they don't need to be routinely told how a car actually looks however it's pretty clear that companies like hund and Kia thanks to poaching the former Audi style King Peter Sher have stolen some real aesthetic ground from the likes of Toyota and Subaru like did the roof rails on Outback really have to be that awful and chunky really would it have been that hard to make the interior at least as well integrated as a Santa Fe or sento and on the AAL front do you think we really need that awful synthes sized faux orchestral Gad every time you get inside Kia does that too and it is a mistake of letting Donald Trump speak proportions but at least there's no fake wood in the outback and there's only one thing I hate more than fake wood no Kim Jong-un with an accurate longrange nuke to be fair the latest Outback looks a lot better than its predecessor which I guess is a bit like saying Kim Jong is somewhat more bent than his father the other big criticism here is the service interval and its cost 6 months and 12,500 km many other manufacturers have moved to 12 months and 15,000 K forgive me for being an engineer here but Metallurgy is just metalurgy conditions inside engines well they're all about the same they don't vary that much and oil technology is constant across the entire automotive industry the reason some companies of which sub Ru is one are resistant to adopting a 12- month service interval is purely commercial it's tied to dealer profitability double the service interval and you have the service in cash flow in dealerships it's that simple dealers would hate that but then car dealers are between pimps and journalists on the vocational respect hierarchy so who Among Us really cares about that there's no good reason for six monthly services in terms of available Metallurgy or oil technology so it's either just a ripoff or inferior engineering Subaru needs to try harder in this respect because although the price of the Outback at all grades is extremely sharp the service cost is comparatively high and certainly that is something for you to consider before taking the decision to buy one there are three engines and they all do a pretty good job the 2 .5i 4 cylinder petrol is the sweet spot for me in this car in a straight line the 3.6 L 6cylinder goes a lot better but I'm not so sure it goes $65,000 better so there's a value proposition in play here and on the diesel front I'm a little bit underwhelmed by the Subaru diesel it's basically outgun by competitors 2 L diesels the hyai Kia 2 L diesel makes 24% more power and 14% more torque so you can't be totally sold on the Subaru diesel in terms of being up there with the best on a comparative basis the other burning question is base spec versus premium spec it's a $66,000 question for the diesel and the 2.5 and of course the 3.6 is available in premium spec only there's no poverty 3.6 option the base car comes with a great deal deal of standard equipment so it's definitely not a poverty pack either it's got a lot of safety equipment in particular including eyesight if you jump into premium you add things like blind spot monitoring Lane change assist and rear cross traffic alert you also get a sunroof a bit of extra garnish upgraded lighting an auto dimmer on the mirror power tailgate proximity key with push button start leather 8-way electrically adjustable front seats the bigger touchcreen and GP PS premium's nicer of course but it's not as if the base spec is all that third world to begin with I didn't jump in the 2.5i and think ah yeah mugod isue smells like Black Hawk Down all over again as a onze fits all family 5 seat SUV with solidly practical breadth of capability and a massive cargo volume it's pretty hard to fought the Outback get the windscreen cover on your insurance and expect to pay a little bit more for a service than your neighbor with Mazdas hundes and K but it's going to be great to drive you know that right if you don't need heavy towing or seven seats an Outback 2.5i premium is the pick of the litter for me at about 46 Grand driveway and if that seems a little bit Rich it's not really that much of a compromise to step back to the base 2.5i for about 40 Grand and that's certainly an affordable full-sized 5 seat SUV if you want get the lowest possible price at least here in Australia contact me via the website we get great deals across the Subaru range and every other brand too and it's completely obligation free and importantly not a scam don't forget to subscribe for regular updates and leave a comment below to let me know what you think I haven't been getting anything like enough hate mail recently either so trolls where are you have I lost my troll abuse sex appeal I certainly hope not I love it when EMB facility and vitory all Collide I miss that I'm John kogan thanks for watching h
