It's a Much Nicer Subaru Forester for 2025
Is a Subaru Forester that doesn’t have a tinny thunk when you close the door still a Forester? A Subaru Forester on 19-inch wheels? A Subaru Forester with an interior that’s … nice? Is that still the car that we fell for?
These are the questions Subaru asks with the new Forester. It’s not all-new, not by any major stretch, because it still has the same basic shell as the old one and it’s still roughly the same size as the old one, both inside and out. It's also still as slow as the old one, but you can tell it’s different from the moment you set foot in it.
That’s in no small part because Subaru assembles the Forester differently, with more welding done on the bare chassis before all the body panels go on. That and because Subaru glued the living hell out of this car. The outgoing Forester has about 26 square-feet of structural adhesive in it. According to Subaru, a new Lexus GX has 46. This new one has 89, not to mention more sound deadening all through the guts and glands of the car. From the first few minutes of driving the Forester, you notice that it’s quieter and calmer. At the high speeds of Montana’s rural highways (the limit can be 80 mph over here), it’s remarkable how adult the Forester feels. It’s like a RAV4. It’s like a real car.
It’s funny how the quietness of the Forester stuck out. I mean, Subaru has nothing to prove in terms of how this car can handle rough roads, washed-out trails, mud, slush, deep mud, and snow. Even on 19s, this Forester in the goldilocks “Sport” trim was completely unflustered driving up to the ghost town of Garnet, Montana, the kind of cruddy mountain roads you encounter driving to whatever trailhead is at the end of your GPS directions.
Maybe that is, though, what’s most impressive about the Forester. For all of its newfound refinement, it still handled the kind of driving a Forester ought to do without much drama at all. If you want a boxy family vehicle that can go off-road, that you might one day turbo (that’s turbo as a verb not a noun), the Forester is still your car. Nobody is going to slap a Garrett on a RAV4, hybrid or not.
But is all of this wasted? People don’t buy Foresters because they ride nice or they’re nice inside. People buy Foresters because they ride nicer than body-on-frame pickups, and are easier to live with going in and out of the co-op parking lot. The bar is low. The Forester doesn’t need to be nice, to be this nice.
OK, there is more wind noise at highway speeds than in any of its rivals, but there’s not much else in terms of trade-offs. (The Forester does still have nice big windows all around, and good visibility. It's maybe the most Nineties thing about it.) If you compare non-hybrids to non-hybrids, AWD to AWD, the Forester gets about the same MPG as the RAV4 or CR-V and costs a couple grand less. Even though the Forester is more expensive across the board, what has been true of its pricing for years is still true. Whatever it costs to buy a particular trim level of RAV4, spending the same money on a Forester gets you what’s effectively a trim level up.
And again, who cares about trim against trim? Toyota will sell you a plug-in hybrid RAV4 right now, and Subaru doesn’t even have a hybrid Forester of any kind to offer, and won’t for a while. Certainly I can dream about turbocharging this new Forester, but driving it right now it is amazingly slow. This car is a relic of the Nineties in more ways than one: you get a big 2.5-liter naturally-aspirated four cylinder that puts out 180 horsepower and 178 lb-ft of torque. We timed a 0-60 run at 9.9 seconds, and that was going downhill. On a long, empty, winding Montana highway, we passed a semi truck. Eventually.
I supposed that if I owned one of these cars, or if I had the prospect of buying one and then owning it for five or six years, I wouldn’t mind spending the extra two and a half grand to make it measurably quieter. And if there is a penalty in weight or an impression of weight, I certainly didn’t feel it while driving the new car. It was just as happy getting out into the middle of the mountains, unmaintained fire roads and all, as it ever has been. For all it might have grown up, it’s still the same Forester.
Subaru is not a big car company. A fraction the size of, say, Toyota, Subaru doesn’t have the money to follow every new car trend. Don’t go looking for new families of EVs, or ranges of hybrids. I guess that explains this new Forester. Nothing radical has changed. It’s like the last one, just a bit nicer.
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