The 2024 Crosstrek Wilderness Feels Like a New Era of Subaru
It’s no secret that car enthusiasts have been a bit down on Subaru recently. With the company’s World Rally Championship days a distant memory and the newest iteration of the competent WRX lacking an STI to look up to, it feels like the days of exciting Pleiades-emblazoned vehicles are behind us. Foresters, Outbacks, and Ascents for Pacific Northwest-residing soccer moms seem to be the main output of the company, and while they’re good, they’re not pulse-pounding.
But in 2022, the company debuted the Wilderness line, starting with the Outback. The lifted suspension, off-road tuning, and extra unpainted plastics then migrated to the Forester, and now, the new 2024 Subaru Crosstrek gets the Wilderness treatment. Here, in the compact and relatively affordable crossover is where the nine-inch-plus ground clearance and rugged nature of the Wilderness ethos gets the most inspiring. A day in the canyons of Zion with it makes me believe that Subaru has found its enthusiast moxy in an entirely new way for the roaring Twenties.
What Venturing Into the Wilderness Gets You
The Wilderness formula on the 2024 Crosstrek is similar to its bigger and older siblings, the Forester and Outback. Ground clearance is bumped from 8.7 inches in the standard Crosstrek to 9.3 inches in the Wilderness. Accompanying that suspension treatment is an engine-protecting skid plate, Yokohama Geolandar A/Ts in place of all-seasons wrapped around new Wilderness-exclusive 17-inch wheels, upgraded engine cooling power, a devoted transmission cooler, and a 4.11 final drive ratio in an upgraded rear differential.
The Crosstrek Wilderness has the same engine found in the Sport and Limited trims, a 2.5-liter boxer-four that puts out 182 horsepower and 178 pound-feet of torque. While performance from 0-60 is roughly identical to the Crosstrek Sport (aero disadvantages cancel out most of the 4.11 rear end’s gearing at speed), the Wilderness can tow 3,500 pounds (2,000 pounds more than the Limited) thanks to the upgraded cooling treatment. A continuously-variable transmission and symmetrical all-wheel-drive paired to Subaru’s X-Mode programming puts the power down to all four wheels, all the time. Inside the cabin, tweaks are minimal, with Wilderness-exclusive StarTex synthetic leather upholstery, a rear overhead hatch light, and copper accents tying together the standard Crosstrek cabin. Subaru’s entire suite of EyeSight driver-assistance tech also comes standard.
It’s indisputable that for $33,290 (after a $1,295 delivery and destination fee)—a bump of just $1,100 over the similarly-equipped Limited trim and $3,000 over the cheapest 2.5-liter-equipped Sport trim—the Wilderness offers a lot of goodies, and they add up quickly. You can’t build the Wilderness out of a base Crosstrek for less, even with a Harbor Freight catalog at the ready. That alone makes it an option worth considering.
The exterior gets the Wilderness-exclusive Geyser Blue paint as a no-cost option (which I chose for my test vehicle); the regular Crosstrek body also gets draped in rugged-looking plastic cladding on basically every surface imaginable. Subaru says that cladding is all easily and modularly replaced, so when you inevitably smack a rock while trail-running, you can swap out the damaged pieces on the cheap. Whether you’re a fan of the new Crosstrek’s styling or not, you have to admit that the Wilderness treatment makes it a lot less anonymous.
Stamping “Subaru” in all-caps across the hatch’s hindquarters has a way of doing that.
The Boxers And The Beehives
To test the new Crosstrek Wilderness properly, Subaru turned me loose on the streets of St. George, Utah, and aimed me towards Zion. My test car had the one and only option available, a $2,270 package that adds a ten-way adjustable power driver’s seat, a 10-speaker Harman Kardon stereo, and an electric sunroof/moonroof combo, meaning it was as fully loaded as a Crosstrek can be. The cabin is utilitarian, but pleasant, and feels appropriate for a $30K-and-change crossover, with comfortably bolstered seats, thoughtfully padded windowsills, convenience touches such as wireless charging and CarPlay, and an excellent analog gauge cluster.
The standard 11.6-inch vertically-oriented touchscreen is one of the few spots where the Crosstrek’s interior doesn’t shine. The base UI isn’t quick or pretty, the way menus overlay on each other means that multiple conflicting arrows can be found on-screen at once, and while the Crosstrek has devoted buttons for stereo controls and temperature, toggling through the X-Mode off-road functionality requires using the touchscreen, which I generally sought to avoid as much as possible. It’s not the worst infotainment UI that I’ve found recently, but it’s far from the best.
Eyes off the screen and back on the road, I found myself much more pleased. The ride is excellent. It gave hardly any hints that it was a Wilderness aside from a slight increase in cabin noise over 60 MPH. Even then, it was still extremely quiet, considering it was riding on genuine A/Ts with enough ground clearance to straddle a bowling ball. Steering is accurate enough to feel competitive with the non-sporty entries in the crossover class—off-road trim or otherwise—and the only hint that this isn’t a pavement-bred SUV is in hard cornering, where body roll is noticeable, albeit not alarming. It was honestly impressive to watch the Crosstrek Wilderness handle the nine-inch heels it wears like they’re flats, and it really felt like there was almost no tradeoff in handling versus the tamer Sport and Limited models.
The 2.5-liter boxer-four it shares with those models, however, is at its best when it’s unnoticed. In-town, the 4.11 rear-end gearing helps the Crosstrek Wilderness move with more urgency, but during highway merges or dashed-yellow passes, it feels asthmatic like its lower-trim siblings. Auto journalists always seem to believe crossovers should deliver neck-breaking acceleration, so let me clarify what I mean: I genuinely felt a bit concerned on uphill passing areas about whether I had enough momentum to pass a semi truck. The drivetrain is just fine when cruising, but overtaking on the freeway will require a little forethought.
It's About Getting You There
Time on the road with the Crosstrek Wilderness proved it was mostly pleasant and certainly not a downgrade from the regular Crosstrek. Satisfied, I headed to the bright-red dirt in the hills surrounding Zion to find out how it could handle off-roading.
There, the Wilderness proved the impressive numbers—20 degrees of approach angle, 33 degrees of departure, 21.1 degrees of breakover, capable of driving up a 38-degree hill—meant capability most crossovers cannot rival. I used them to the fullest, tackling what was almost definitely meant to be a side-by-side course in this crossover with license plates and heated seats. It performed excellently, with X-Mode helping direct power to the wheels left on the ground when I was tripoding, and it was easy to guide through tight corners thanks to its genuinely compact exterior dimensions and 17-foot-and-change turning radius.
While its maximum, 10-tenths off-road abilities are impressive, I’ve off-roaded for years in my own cars and learned that if I end up somewhere that I need a crossover to three-wheel up a 38-degree slope, I’ve probably gotten horribly lost. What was vastly more remarkable than its raw abilities was instead how comfortable the Crosstrek was to drive on the way to and from this remote ATV course. On rocky, poorly-groomed Forest Service roads—the kind you’ll find on the way to all of the best trailheads—the longer-stroke shocks and taller springs kept the cabin placid. Even in the passenger seat as my driver hauled down rutted single-tracks, it was smooth enough inside to use my phone and never once reach for the grab handle.
Here, as I drove through the most remote stretches of the Beehive State, is where I realized the Crosstrek Wilderness felt like a new era of Subaru. The company has been synonymous with traipsing through the outdoors since the days of the Brat, but with an ever-lengthening list of soft-core off-road crossovers to compete with, the unquestioned supremacy of Subarus at the trailhead has threatened to wane. The Wilderness answers these would-be usurpers with numerical dominance—the Crosstrek Wilderness has a half-inch more ground clearance than a base-model Bronco—but more importantly, it rides more comfortably off-road than I thought possible for a crossover. Even when really hustling off the pavement, I never found driving the Crosstrek Wilderness tiring to drive, which is a rarity in unibody vehicles off pavement.
This, to me, shows that Subaru understands how the average American overlander truly uses their trucks. The Crosstrek Wilderness has a 700-pound roof rack and a cavernous hatch opening. It offers accessories to help transport your pets. It boasts enough towing capacity to haul a small camping trailer or a jet ski. It does all this while sacrificing absolutely zero on-road comfort and offering the most off-road comfort I’ve ever seen in its class. It is focused on enabling you to get through the dirt to the beautiful places you want to spend time at, rather than honing in purely on trying to be a rock-crawling daily driver, and it’s a much better car for it.
Wilderness Over World Rally
According to Subaru, every fifth Outback and Forester sold today is a Wilderness. It wouldn’t surprise me if the take rate for the Crosstrek is twice that. This seems like the most compelling offering in the Wilderness line yet, thanks to its extremely competitive price point and compact form factor; its focus on how people actually use their off-road cars means that despite just a half-inch bump to ground clearance, it feels leagues above most competitors in realistic get-me-to-the-trailhead driving.
And while the Wilderness ethos isn’t pulse-pounding in the way of older rally-bred Subarus, it’s much better for it. It’s rare that I want to scandi-flick my way up a mountain, but I go hiking once or twice a week, and I’d rather drive this than virtually anything else at a $30,000 price-point to get there. It’s not the same way Subaru demonstrated its off-road supremacy in the past, but make no mistake—the Crosstrek Wilderness will still be king of the trailhead.
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