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Subaru Outback
No geek
Those who immediately dismiss station wagons as boring obviously haven't seen and driven our featured vehicle. Vernon Sarne has, lucky him!
Photography by Jaykee Evangelista & Joel Paz
It's one thing to make a boring car brand exciting, it's ano-ther matter to make a bland vehi-cle type desirable. The first is easy. Just redesign the brand's entire product line and—surprise, sur-prise—you have the season's hottest nameplate. Just look at what Volvo has done in the last decade.
What is trickier is to inject hip-ness into a geeky vehicle type, like, say, a minivan or—in the case of the Subaru Outback—a station wagon. I mean, how many ways can car designers transform a wagon, such that it doesn't lose its identity and reason for being?
I imagine the design brief to be something like this: "Produce a station wagon that mothers can use on weekdays to fetch the kids from school and do their requisite shop-ping, and that fathers can drive on weekends to perform some pedal-to-metal mud-splashing out of town. Something that moms will feel totally at home in, and that dads will be delighted to show off to their poker buddies."
Talk about coming up with a non-alcoholic beer or a nicotine-free cigarette. But the trouble with making a product pander to oppo-sing needs is that its intended mar-kets tend to ignore it altogether.
That's exactly what Subaru tried to accomplish in 1996 when it introduced the Outback trim line for its Legacy station wagon in the North American market. The Out-back variant was easily distingui-shed from an ordinary Legacy by its all-wheel drive system, body cladding and off-road tires. It's like putting Senator Mar Roxas in full battle gear and sending him to Mindanao to trade bullets with psychotic zealots. Indeed, the idea seemed this outrageous at the time.
Subaru did this to patch a then gaping hole in its product line, which was the lack of a proper sport-utility vehicle. It so happened that Americans, easily the biggest automotive consumer group on the face of the earth, loved SUVs so much that carmakers everywhere scrambled to roll at least one off the assembly line—yes, even those traditionally without a sport-ute in their stable.
This is primarily the reason Pors-che has the Cayenne and Cadillac has the Escalade. It's amazing how everyone bows to the wishes of the Yanks. Market size rules!
So while its engineers were burning the midnight oil laboring on a new SUV model, Subaru released a Legacy station wagon in off-road trim. It was just meant to be a temporary solution to Subaru's problem of not having an SUV at a time when customers were cla-moring for one. Subaru, after all, was set to introduce the Forester. All it needed was a model to make the wait a bit more bearable.
It was also how Volvo came up with the idea of making an off-road version of the V70 (XC70) while awaiting the arrival of the XC90.
Thing is, Americans and even the Japanese bought the idea. And why not? It's really like having two vehicles in one. You want to talk about value for money? Here it is.
The Legacy Outback did so well that Subaru decided in 2000—even after launching the Forester—to make the Outback a separate model. This explains why you'll no longer see a "Legacy" decal on any part of the vehicle.
The Outback is nothing like your average station wagon. Nothing about it is. The body styling alone is enough to set off a round of stiff necks among rubber-necking bystanders, something only red sports cars have been known to achieve.
The design from front bumper to rear simply screams "action". Even the shapes of the headlights and the taillights are dynamic. You'd be hard-pressed to identify the cate-gory it belongs to because it could really pass for a hunkered-down compact SUV, especially at first glance. It does look like Subaru's very own Forester, particularly when viewed squarely from behind.
Inside, the sportiness continues. From the three-spoke steering wheel to the instrument panel, the Outback looks every inch a driver's car. That the tachometer and the speedometer dominate the instru-ment cluster, doesn't surprise me. This vehicle is designed to run and get dirty.
Doing service under the hood is a 3.0-liter DOHC 24-valve flat-six, rated at twice the power of a mor-tal station wagon (245hp). With a torque rating of 297Nm, this boxer engine sends the Outback hurtling along the pavement.
When it comes to the design and manufacture of horizontally op-posed engines, Subaru figures in the top echelon of the car industry. The 2.5-liter flat-four found on the Impreza and the Forester topped its category in this year's International Engine of the Year Awards.
But the tour de force in the Outback package is Subaru's vaunted symmetrical all-wheel drive system. Approach a bend too fast and the Outback won't panic like a normal station wagon might. The car doesn't get unsettled, distributing its weight evenly however which way you tug at the wheel. Take a zigzag road and it will tiptoe along the outer edge of the curve with all the grace of a ballet dancer.
| Subaru Outback |
| We say: We say: That this station wagon has a name as outdoorsy as 'Outback' should tell you much about its ruggedness. |
Price: P2.24M
Engine: 3.0L flat-six
Power: 245hp
Torque: 297Nm
Transmission: 5-speed AT
Layout/Seating: AWD/5
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Standard on the 3.0-liter model are dual airbags, antilock brakes, five-speed Sportshift automatic transmission, eight-way power driver's seat, CD player and 17-inch alloy wheels.
Okay, I admit not driving the Outback on dirt, but which sane buyer of a P2.24-million vehicle would? And there lies my main beef with this car: It's kind of too expensive for the basic proposition of an all-wheel-drive station wa-gon. Its pricing basically defeats the purpose of its existence, which is to rumble through the outback.
Then again, it's more than a million bucks cheaper than the Volvo XC70. So maybe the Subaru Outback is a bargain after all.
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Top Gear Philippines - November 2006
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