I was worried at first. You see, the doors sounded too good.
A Subaru Impreza is the absolute opposite of the Mercedes G-Wagen. People buy that truck in spite of all good sense, knowing full well that it is too much for what they need, too big and too tall and too thirsty and too ostentatious. But they buy it because the moment they step inside and close the door–kathunk–the outside world closes off. Bank vaults sound less reassuring than the doors on a G-Wagen.
A typical Impreza’s doors? They could not sound more tinny. More light and flimsy. You plop down into the cloth seat, smiling. The world washes over you. You’re barely a dust mote. So small and insignificant, floating effortlessly over the road, or gravel, or snow, or mud. Nothing can hold you down. You’re not guzzling 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 else.
At least, that’s how Imprezas have been. This is a new model, and Subaru is adamant that its new chassis is stiffer than the old one, more robust. The welding is better, and structure more reinforced, and it’s all done with better steel so that the chassis itself is lighter than the one it replaces. (The car as a whole is about a hundred pounds heavier than the outgoing automatic Imprezas, ending up around 3171 lbs for the Base and 3275 lbs for the RS.) Worst of all, the doors sound… nice! Almost what you might call solid! Has it, then, lost its charm? After all, it has lost its manual transmission, gone entirely from every variant of the Impreza. The base model? CVT. The Sport model? CVT. The freshly-returned, naturally-aspirated 2.5-liter 2.5 RS? CVT! There isn’t even an analog handbrake for you to rip sideways on unpaved pull-outs. You need to get a WRX for either kind of action.
I was worried that this more sturdy-sounding Impreza had lost some of its innocence, some of its carefree attitude. Before I could weigh in on its entire vibe, I was surprised. The stiffer chassis might have made it dreadfully more robust, but it also allowed Subaru engineers to make the springs softer. Even in this 2.5 RS I was taken aback. This car is comfortable. It’s oddly nice to be in, particularly on a bumpy, winding, undulating mountain road. My driving partner, Emmet White, from our partner publication Autoweek, at first wondered if it was all just this particular stretch of well-paved road that Subaru picked out for us to drive. But then the two of us set out on our own route, away from where we were meant to go. You see, we had a mission. We had to find Tulare Lake.
Tulare Lake was once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. It was so big people took steam ships to cross it. It was big enough to have islands. It was bigger than the Great Salt Lake and it has been dry since 1899, drained by canals, feeding agriculture and the booming population of the young state.
After years of drought, California took on record rain this winter. It still is seeing record snow, passing 700 inches at Mammoth the day of our drive. Atmospheric rivers poured down over California and the phantom Tulare Lake reappeared.
I checked google and it was a short 80 miles from where Subaru intended for us to be and, given the historic nature of the moment, I kindly asked if they didn’t mind two car writers disappearing with one of their vehicles for the few hours it took to drive there and back. With a quick yes, we shot off, headed inland.
Our beautiful winding roads of the short Coast Range mountains straightened out as we drove, tucking behind a very confident local in a Suzuki Aerio SX as they overtook car after car. We lost any hope of a view as we crossed over I-5, in the incomparably flat San Joaquin Valley. Tulare Lake was around here, somewhere. Emmet had been checking news stories on his phone while I drove, hoping to find some street name, some detail we could nail down. The only other vehicles on these bumpy, potholed roads were trucks. The Impreza soaked everything up, even when we turned off onto rough dirt levees. What I said before about the springs on this car being softer isn’t just some slight tweak. This is a genuinely cushy vehicle, a good bit plusher than any of the other new economy cars I've driven. On those twisting hilly backroads, it was hilarious, twisting and diving into the corners, making the car’s sluggish 182 hp and 178 lb-ft of torque exciting. (We wondered quite how slow the 152-hp Base and Sport would feel, though Subaru didn’t bring any along.) Out here in the flats, it was simply comfortable.
Subaru advised us that it has made this Impreza both more and less “all-wheel drive-y” than the car it replaces. Mechanically, the entire all-wheel drive system is very similar to the last-gen car’s, only it has been tuned to lock up a little bit less, to be more open. It has loosened the center diff’s operation. It’s for the car to turn into corners better, to hold a line better, to feel more agile, according to Subaru’s Car Line Product Planning Manager Garrick Goh. More like a car, less like a truck. Subaru also claims that the car can shift power more quickly to the front or the rear of the car, but maintained that this was not the result of lightening any of the components, or making them less durable. It has a new and more powerful oil pump for the CVT and the viscous center diff, quicker to shuffle power around.
Whatever the physical or digital changes of the car, there was no ground uneven enough, no dirt loose enough to get in the way of our driving. We may or may not have done a donut or two on a farm road leading off a levee, but that’s no real demerit.
Eventually Emmet switched to checking for road closures in the area and after a little helpful direction from a team of very laid back California Department of Transportation workers blocking our way, we finally found it.
There wasn’t much to see of Tulare Lake at first. We were just following along an irrigation ditch north, amazed that it was up to the peak of its drainage channels. And then the water was simply up along the side of the road. Out beyond it, more water. Beyond that, in the midst of this valley, water still. As far as we could see, we were surrounded by it. I pointed out that an airport was coming up on the car’s on-screen map. We saw its rooftop sticking over the surface. Not much else.
Then it sort of consumed us. Water spilled from west to east, over the road entirely, dribbling down the embankment to our right. Happily, the car forged through it, like the F-150s and F-250s around us. We stopped for photos out on a dirt landing, the reformed lake lapping at our tires. I worried for a moment that we might get stuck out here, that the ground could be saturated and thick, and a wary honk from a passing truck advised us 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. Nobody had to make any awkward calls back to Subaru, that we’d lost one of their new cars to a lake that hasn’t existed for over a century.
It was the best kind of road trip, sweet and spontaneous. An Impreza kind of drive. We didn’t worry about gas. Even driving as hard as we could possibly imagine, we couldn’t get the MPG below 24, and the car has a 16.6-gallon tank. We had room for anything we could possibly need, the car’s new infotainment system paired our phones and directions with ease, blasted Andre Nickatina through the speakers with aplomb, and handled any kind of unpaved excursion we could throw at it. More than that, it was the kind of car that made us want to do this kind of drive. There are sharper cars to drive, even with this Impreza’s new dual-pinion electric steering rack (not the same as the WRX’s but similar, says Subaru), and there are cars with a classier interior. The Honda Civic is probably both of those things. I just don’t know if that car has the same spark as this Subaru. A Corolla certainly doesn’t.
There’s another thing interesting gone with this generation of Impreza. No more sedans. The take rate for hatchbacks on the last generation was something around 75 percent, Subaru claimed. It didn’t make sense to sell the three-box anymore.
The Impreza knows what it has to do; it’s going niche. As well as anyone else, Subaru knows a Corolla makes more sense on paper. A Corolla hybrid is rated at 50 miles per gallon combined. In the real world, it can give you double what you get in an Impreza. (The Base and Sport Imprezas rate at 27/34/30 while the RS manages 26/33/29. The CVT keeps revs low on the highway, and we barely crested 2100 RPM at around 70-odd mph.) People don’t need basic cars to have AWD.
But Americans are less and less drawn to basic cars at all. The new base Impreza starts right at $23,000 with destination. This is a couple grand cheaper than a five-door Civic, 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, per Kelley Blue Book. Around here, you go for a niche, or you don’t go at all.
So I sort of wish that Subaru embraced that niche a bit more. I wish we did still have a manual handbrake, a manual transmission. I wish this car was a little bit more of a hooligan in character. But would I wish either of those features to come at a yet greater cost, with yet worse fuel economy? I’m not so sure.
In a way, I was there at this launch just in case. After all, this is a new Impreza. Something could be drastically different about it. Maybe the infotainment system would be buggy as hell. Maybe the ride would be awful. Maybe the engine would drone so loud on the highway that I got a migraine, or the fuel economy would be so bad my gas card receipt would cause a revolt in the accounting department. But none of that happened. The new Impreza was like the old one, only a little bit less ugly and a good deal more comfortable. It still has its distinctive gargling in the sink sound, it still has all-wheel drive, and it still has an upright and practical design. I’m mostly happy it’s still getting made.
Road & Track's Deputy Editor who once got a Dakar-winning race truck stuck in a sand dune, and rolled a Baja Bug off an icy New York road, and went flying off Mount Washington in a Nissan 240SX rally car, and...
