April 8, 2023

A new car in 2023

I am still driving my 2000 Toyota Tacoma. It has over 300,000 miles on it and I just paid to have a new clutch installed. It runs fine. A testament to Toyota quality.

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:

The Toyota options clearly offer more hard core 4x4 performance. The Subaru vehicles are AWD and are said to offer impressive offroad performance, but I remain somewhat skeptical. As I am getting older, I find myself less likely to do challenging 4x4 travel, but it seems like when I do I invariably find myself in situations that demand all that my current 4x4 Tacoma can offer.

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.

Note that in every case, a given vehicle is offered in different "packages" which I have tried to indicate in the above. There are a multitude of variables that I have not accounted for. The Tacoma can be obtained with different cab configurations. Toyota also offers "premium" versions on top of the "off road" variant, and so forth.

Jeep Rubicon

I only included this because I expected it (and rightly so) to be absurdly expensive. A friend advises me that is once used a wretched V6 engine made by Chrysler (that he also had in his miserable Dodge mini-van). That would be enough to turn me away from considering the Rubicon no matter what compensating virtue it might offer. The 2023 Rubicon offering apparently has a V8 engine. As mentioned below, a powerful engine is pretty much the last thing you need for offroad performance. This vehicle clearly pitches an image (which includes the powerful engine) to the "macho" American male with plenty of money, little sense, and an overriding concern about their self image. Let's move on.

Subaru "wilderness" option

My view on this has run from one extreme to the other, so read carefully.

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):

A quick note on the skid plate and clearance. A skid plate often consumes as much as an inch of clearance. The fact that the Forester includes a skid plate and provides additional clearance suggests that something akin to a lift kit is part of the package. Perhaps they simply redesigned the front suspension to offer more clearance, which would certainly be better than an aftermarket lift kit.

Outback or Forester

I have tried to compare these two vehicles on countless occasions and always end up scratching my head and "not getting it". A visit to the dealer in April of 2023 was a big help. The salesman said "the Outback is more like a car, the Forester is more like a jeep".

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).

Sleeping space

As long as we are talking cargo space, note that the Forerunner has 47 cubic feet of cargo space. It is clearly a bigger vehicle. The Forerunner measures 73 inches from the back of the console to the back hatch door -- but there is a "ramp" behind the front seats where the platform with the rear seats down is not level.
Here is an article:

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.

Gas economy

The Toyota Forerunner with its V6 engine gets 16/19 mpg. This is incredibly dismal compared to 26/33 for the Subaru choices. That is the price you pay for a bigger engine moving a bigger and heavier vehicle (and all that hard core 4x4 hardware adds weight).

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).

Subaru off-road performance

Probably my biggest concern about either of the Subaru is that I am giving up the serious 4x4 performance I have gotten used to with my Toyota Tacoma. On the other hand, I am not one of these guys who goes out solely to push his rig to the limit. My vehicle is a tool to get me to interesting places. Most often this means remote trailheads or abandoned mines.

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.

Tacoma or Forerunner

Let's entirely ignore the cost difference, imagine the price is the same, and ask which we would choose to own. The big plus of the Forerunner is a totally enclosed cargo area and civilized rear seats. I don't particularly need the rear seats and should frankly evaluate the Forerunner as if the rear seats were perpetually folded down.

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.

Car ownership

How long does the average American keep a car. It is hard to find good data on this without strange doubletalk. One number is about 8 years for "the length of time people have owned the vehicle they kept the longest". Clearly this is cherry picking for a longer number. Another statistic is that 64 percent of Americans have owned the car they are currently driving for 5 years or less. A number more like I am looking for is 8.4 years for the length of time people keep a car that they bought new. People keep Toyota Camry and Honda Accords for 9.4 years. A Ford F150 gets kept for 8.5 years. So it is now 2023, if 8 years is the average, the average person is now getting rid of their vehicle made in 2015. That is sobering given I am driving a 2000 Toyota Tacoma and feeling good about it. I don't feel quite so good about the 1999 Toyota Camry I am driving, but it runs just fine.
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Auto repair pages / tom@mmto.org