Subaru Forester 2020: Why the hybrid Forester is boxing outside of its class. Detailed expert review

G'day, I'm Paul. I have some really, really exciting news for you today. Subaru's first ever Forester Hybrid is just behind me. Okay, well, it's not that exciting, but I think Subaru is excited because it is the first time they've been able to put an E-Boxer, which is a pretty cool-sounding name, into this Forester for Australia. Now, this car here is the top-spec Forester Hybrid. It's called the S model, and it's just under 46 grand. You can see the pricing for the rest of the Forester range down below. Now, I found something interesting out while researching this car, and that is that Toyota owns about 10% of Subaru. So, that means the hybrid running gear in this car should be pretty good, right? I don't know. We're going to find that out today. Now, if you want to skip ahead, you can use the time codes up there, or alternatively, if you're on YouTube, just scroll down to the description, and then you can press the link, so that will take you to other parts of this review. I would also love if you guys could hit the subscribe button and also press the bell icon. That's going to tell you every single time we drop a new car video on YouTube. Let's talk styling. So, when I was younger, it was always the trendy people that had the Forester, and when you see a Forester, you know that that person is adventurous. They go outside, they go kayaking, and they do fun things that a lot of us normal inside people don't. But anyway, you can get the Forester in eight different colours, and I think they've done a good job with the design here. Often, Subaru, I don't know, with some models, they completely revolutionise the design and change it completely, but the Forester just seems to have been a step change, and they've never really gone crazy with different designs. I mean, you remember stuff like the old Tribeca, that thing was just a complete mishmash of design, but this looks pretty good. I like the chrome highlights, it sort of sets off well with the paint there. You've got the proudly worn Subaru emblem here, doubles as a base for the radar sensor as well, with the cameras around the car. It is a really rugged looking car, but still has a bit of luxury styling to it. So, have a look at these headlights. You have LED daytime running lights, and then full LED main beam. This gives you excellent projection at night time if you're out in the country. You don't want halogen lights, you need these full LEDs set up so that you can actually see nice and far. It will make your driving a lot more safer. Now, have a look around the side here. 18-inch alloy wheels, you've got fairly chubby tyres there, which means you can do a little bit of light off-roading. That's what Subaru has always been known for with their permanent all-wheel drive system. It's kind of an all-terrain tyre, but has a road focus to it, so it's more at home on the road. But if you do go down a couple of muddy tracks, it's not going to get you completely stuck. I love these satin chrome mirrors. You've got a set of roof racks there. Come around to the back here, you've got that E-Boxer badge. That is basically a flat, four-cylinder, naturally aspirated petrol engine with the hybrid, parallel hybrid gear attached to it. Now, the interesting thing here is if you get a towing pack with this car, you can only tow 1,200 kilos with a braked trailer. You have to go for the non-hybrid version to be able to tow 1,500. So you are going to be limited there, and I'll also run you through shortly the tank, which is much smaller in this car and ironically gives you less range than the non-hybrid versions. Okay, interior styling. And in traditional Japanese fashion, there is a lot going on here for the driver. There's lots of buttons on the steering wheel, you've got two information displays, an infotainment screen. So there is a lot to get hold of, but once you get used to it, it's actually all very straightforward to use, which is good news. Now, what about the way that it all looks, though? They have gone with Piano Black around the place, and I'm really not a fan of Piano Black because it scratches very easily, and like even down there, it's just hard to keep that stuff clean and scratch-free. You kind of have to buff it every now and then, and it seems a bit pointless to have it here. They do have this soft-touch material around the place, and my favorite test is our hardness test. This is a durometer. It's on the sure scale, and it goes from zero to 100 on the hardness, where zero is soft, 100 is hard. Let's see what that dashboard is like. Okay, so it's around the 60 mark. We'll see what this center console is like. That feels nice and soft. Yeah, that's impressive. So that's about 26, 27. What we're going to do, we saw your comments about getting like a table of all the different cars. We're going to work on that in our future review, so you can actually see how this compares to other cars. But from memory, that is actually a really good combo there. I love the sort of fake stitching they have here. The seats are a really nice design as well. They've got perforations in there. They're finally heated. For some reason, Subaru couldn't get heated seats into the Forester. That's now been solved. So it is a nice layout, but what about build quality? Japanese are known for building quality cars. It's not quite the case here. Look at that. That's a little bit loose, and it's a bit loosey-goosey as well. So I don't know. It feels like this isn't as solid or as sturdy as previous generations of the Forester. Let's talk infotainment. If you're buying this car for a family, you're going to want to have a very simple-to-use infotainment system, and Subaru's done a good job with this. It's an eight-inch unit, and it's a touchscreen as well. Everything's controlled here. You can see shortcut buttons down the bottom for radio, map, apps, media, and then your key controls for tuning and then volume as well. This is what the home screen looks like. You have all of your shortcuts there to the main functions. You can then add your own shortcuts, and there's three layers of screens you can add them to. Up the top there, you'll see your Bluetooth status, the battery of your phone, and also how much reception you have. We'll quickly dive through these menus here. Phone. This is a very basic phone menu. What I love here, though, is the ability to redial. Often with these systems, if you're on the move, you need to go through your recent history, find the person that you want, click on them. Whereas here, you can just redial, so that is a handy function. And then it's backed up by a voice recognition system. That works really well. It is better than the outgoing generation of Forrester, and it easily recognizes your voice. You can also hook up to Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, and that displays nicely on the screen there as well. When you do use the voice recognition through those systems, it'll use your phone to communicate with the cloud, so you're getting better clarity on the voice recognition as well. This will also display your messages when allowed through the phone, which is a really good feature too. Map menu. This is the map display. You can see here that it's a sort of fairly basic map. It is a little bit laggy, so when you're zooming in and out, it's not the fastest system in the world. We'll try and put an address in here. Let's see how quick that is. We'll pop in Melbourne Airport. Okay, that's going really nice and fast. Okay, it's taking a little while there to search. Still searching. Okay, there we go. So, that's worked. It takes a little bit of time to do that, but it gets there in the end. You can also do it through the voice recognition system. Back on the home screen there, you've got the media menu. This is Bluetooth audio streaming. You've got two USB connections there as well, plus auxiliary, and you also have a CD player. This is starting to disappear from a lot of cars, so Subaru has retained that, which is a handy feature to have if you have some old school mixers. Radio, you've got FM, AM, DAB, digital radio. One of my gripes here though is having to go through bands to find the stations you're after. This displays everything in one giant list, which is very handy, although it seems to break the alphabetical order. It goes here from M to V to A again, so it is strange that it divides it in that way instead of showing you everything in alphabetical order. If we then jump over to the apps menu, this is where you pair CarPlay and Android Auto, and then finally you've just got the car settings. So, this is all very basic information for the car. You can connect to Wi-Fi to do software updates. If you have Wi-Fi connection in the garage at home, this is a good way to keep the car up to date. So, outside of that, this is a fuss-free system. It's very easy to use, and while you're on the move, you won't be taking your eyes off the road constantly because you have the backup of a voice recognition system as well. Enough about the infotainment system, what else are you getting for your $46,000-$47,000 investment? So, it starts down here with dual zone climate control. There's only two zones in the car, so you won't get a third zone for the second row. I love this feature though, so press that button and it brings up the side camera. This is handy for parking near kerbs. You're able to see how close you are to make sure you don't gouge those rims, and then you also have a front view as well. So, instead of a traditional 360-degree view camera, Subaru has gone a little bit different with it, and I think it works. It's sort of fairly easy to see, and it moves with the wheels and stuff, so you can see exactly what's going on around the car. In terms of safety technology, it comes with what Subaru calls EyeSight. It's pretty much just an AEB system that uses these two cameras. It's able to detect pedestrians, which is handy. The radar cruise control, which is on the steering wheel here, and then you have a set of LED lights ahead of the driver too, that tells you when it's locked onto a target, and I love the screen that appears on here. It's got like this laser focus onto the car in front, and it tells you whether you're locked onto that and how close it is to the driver. The top spec model comes with an eight-speaker Harman Kardon sound system. What I don't like though is the lack of an auto-dimming rear vision mirror. This thing's from like the 80s or the 90s. I'm surprised that Subaru hasn't actually integrated a more modern version of this reverse view mirror. There is one thing I'm going to spend just a little bit more time explaining here. When you hop into the car, there's a set of cameras here that detect your face and do a facial recognition sweep. Now, there's two purposes behind that. The first is a driver attention warning. If you're getting drowsy, the car will be able to detect that, and it will give you a series of warnings to tell you you need to pull over and have a rest. What it also does though, is it differentiates your face from other drivers, and it allows you to also the seat settings. When you do get into the car, if you've hopped in after your partner and perhaps they sit close to the steering wheel, the chair will actually go backwards for your seating position, along with the mirrors. So, it is a pretty clever function, and I like that it's a different system to just relying on a key. It means that you can just keep the key in your pocket and then jump in the car. It'll detect your face, adjust all your settings, and then you just hit the road. So, practicality and storage. How does it look here in the Forester? It is impressive, but there are some things they could improve. So, let's look at phone storage first. You've got a slot up the front here, but if you've got a big phone like I do, it doesn't actually fit there. There's no wireless phone charging either. Let's see if it fits there. Nope. Fits in the cup holder, but nowhere else. So, cup holders, that works well. You've also got cup holders in the door, so you can fit a full-size bottle in there, plus other bits and pieces next to it. Storage in the center here, you have a coin tray, which is handy, and then a deep storage box with a 12-volt outlet in there, two USB outlets up the front, and another 12-volt as well. Another interesting thing, have a look at this. This is the glove box. There's not a great deal of room in there once you have the manual and all the other bits and pieces you're going to throw in there, but have a look at this. This is where they've put the tyre pressure sensor set button. They've kind of buried it away randomly instead of putting it next to the driver's knee where you have another bank of buttons. So, very odd place to have it. What about comfort? The seat is comfortable, but it is a bit firm. There isn't a bolster adjustment on it, so it's just firm, and it doesn't really sort of feel comfortable if you're going to be spending a long time in here, but the seats are electrically adjustable, and the seating position itself is really nice. The steering wheel fits nicely in the hand with those paddle shifters right there. We're in the back of the Forester, but before I shut my door, let me show you this. Most other cars, when you're getting in and out, the door will open up to sort of around there somewhere, and you've got to clamber your way out, but the Forester opens up to almost 90 degrees. You can see from that angle there, the door is almost completely open, and that means loading child seats in and even loading kids in is going to be a much easier process, so that is a really cool feature. What about the rest of this cabin here? The top spec comes with this pretty awesome-looking sunroof. I know when I was a kid, I would have loved to have something like that in the back of the car as we were driving through a forest or doing a long-distance journey. My opinion is, and let me know in the comments below if this is right, but do you get over sunroofs? I find that whenever we're testing a car with a sunroof, if it's summer, especially here in Australia where you've got that searing sun, if you do have it open, you end up with half an arm that's burnt and the other half that isn't, because that's where the sun is coming through. So anyway, let me know in the comments below. What about legroom? Well, you don't have a massive driveline hump, which is handy. You have masses of toe room, which is great. Heaps of knee room and lots of headroom as well, even with this sunroof here, so this is a pretty good space, even for adults. The rest of the features in the back here, you've got a litany of matte pockets here, so dual tiers with a divider in the middle. You have two 2.1 amp USB chargers, a center armrest here as well, two cup holders with a bit more piano black, just because we didn't have enough of that. Now, this is fascinating. Most other cars come with a lap sash seatbelt that you just pull down and clip in. Watch this, though. For a Forester, you have to DIY your own seatbelt. So you have to get this bottom section, it plugs into here, and then once your person is in there, you then plug it into here. But the problem is, when you're done with that and you want to put it away, that can just sit there like that. But to actually get this off, you have to use the other part of this seatbelt to unplug it, and then you have to kind of tuck it away on your own, and it just sort of dangles about there. So, I don't know, not sure I love the way that works, but anyway. You can also recline your seats, but instead of there being a control down the side, you have to use this lever, which I've got here on my side as well. You pull that, and then it allows that seat to recline a little bit, which is kind of handy if you want to kick back and relax a little bit. There isn't a huge amount of recline available on it, though. Okay, if you've driven a previous generation Forester, you'll know how slow the boot was. Have a look at this power tailgate. The speed has improved by about 30%, so that is flying up now, which is handy. Okay, in terms of cargo space, a little over 500 litres with the second row in place. Have a look at this. You have storage under here, and the ironic part is that despite the fact this has an extra battery in it, this has more boot room than the non-hybrid version, and that's because the battery, which is just there, is eating into the space where your spare tyre used to be. So instead, this comes with a tyre repair kit, which is that thing right there. It's a can of goo and then a compressor that pushes it into the hole in your tyre. Works okay most of the time, but there are parts of the tyre that you cannot fix with that system, but this is a good hidey if you do have some valuables you don't want anyone to see. This is a really clever system. So that's the cargo blind. It is the standard type, so it has this spring mechanism on it, and then it clips into position, but often you have this space here with cars that have reclining second rows, and they've got this clever system. So you have two levels of adjustability. If your seats are pulled back, you can have this here so you can't see through from the outside, and finally, if your seats are in their upright position, you push it all the way to the front, and that covers that gap so you can't see any valuables that you have in the back, and that then just goes into position. Now, let's see how our luggage fits into here. We've got the laptop bag off to the side. This will fit fine, but I just want to give you an indication of exactly how much room there is. Now, these seats also act as meat tenderisers. Let me show you what I mean. So with one pull of this, they fall down with some absolute force. So if you've got a chicken fillet, stick it under there and it'll be absolutely pulverised. We've also got that subwoofer there as well for that hum and cut on sound system. So we've hit the road in the Forester, but there's a problem. This has happened in the last three Japanese cars we've had. Watch this. If I try and turn left, I can't. My elbow gets stuck there on the centre console, and then when I try and turn left, I can't go beyond that. It is seriously bizarre. It only happens in Japanese cars, and the centre console just doesn't have enough room between the steering wheel and the top of it to actually make a proper turn. What is an e-boxer? Well, this is Subaru's two-litre petrol engine, and I'll run you through the figures in just a second, but what they've done is added a parallel hybrid system. That means that it can either run entirely on EV, and that's up to around 40 kilometres an hour as it accelerates. It can either run entirely on internal combustion, or it can do a combination of both, and when it's both of them, they can team up to give you a little bit of extra torque. Here's the weird thing, though. Subaru doesn't quote what the actual combined torque and power figures are, so the two-litre engine produces 110 kilowatts of power and 196 newton-metres of torque. The electric motor is 12.3 kilowatts and 66 newton-metres, so that means when I hit the throttle, they both combine to do not a whole lot, unfortunately. That is really nasty. So, it's attached to a continuously variable transmission, and when you floor it, not a whole lot changes. It is really not a very pleasant setup. The real problem, though, is when you come to a stop. So, we've come to a stop now, the petrol engine has kicked off, and we're about to take off. What you get is this shunt as you take off. It is truly bizarre. I don't experience this in any other hybrid cars, and it has been so poorly calibrated that there's no smooth way of taking off. The second you breathe on the throttle a little bit too hard, you get that shunt in the back as the boxer engine kicks on. I just can't understand how they've got this so wrong and released a car that feels like this behind the wheel. Now, what is a self-charging hybrid? That's what Subaru calls this, and EV evangelists absolutely hate that phrase because it kind of suggests that the car will charge on its own. Well, technically, it kind of does because when you're driving the car and you're using the brakes, it's actually using the car's inertia and the momentum to charge the system through regenerative braking. That word's always hard. As you lean onto the brake, you can see the system charging the battery, and then it provides that battery power later on for giving you a little bit of propulsion and also to power some of the auxiliary systems. Okay, let's talk fuel economy. Obviously, the hybrid system is going to help that. Well, kind of. It uses a lithium-ion battery instead of a nickel metal hydride battery, which is used in cars like the RAV4 hybrid. But the problem here is that it only saves you about half a litre per 100 kilometres in fuel consumption. So, we've got an Instagram question from Zachary Ong. What's it like in the real world? Well, not great. If the official is 6.7, this is currently doing 8.9, and that's with a majority of highway driving. So, that is a really poor effort. Here's the confusing part. The hybrid only comes with a 48-litre fuel tank, so it means you're only getting around 700 kilometres of range per tank. The non-hybrid, which is just the 2.5-litre Forester, gets around 850 kilometres worth of range. So, it is very confusing that you pay more to get the car that travels less distance. It doesn't really make much sense. Okay, so we've gone through the negatives. What about the positives? So, at under 40 kilometres an hour, you can push the car along only on EV, and that seems to work really well. You have to be very gentle with the throttle, because if you use too much, the petrol engine kicks on. So, you kind of have to be very gentle with it and let it get along on its own speed without pushing it too hard. And when you are in that EV mode, it's actually nice and quiet inside the cabin. You don't really hear a great deal, but the second that petrol engine comes on, and even more so when you get on the throttle and the CVT flares up, you're starting to hear a lot of noise coming into the cabin. The ride's good. It's slightly on the firmer side of comfortable, but that comes down to those 18-inch alloy wheels. I think if you went for 17s instead, the ride would be a little bit smoother, but it's not the end of the world. It's not like it's so firm that it's rattling your teeth out. It is just comfortable enough for a country drive, sucking up potholes and bumps really nicely, and you don't get any rack rattle through the steering. Speaking of the steering, plenty of communication through there. This car's fantastic for the reason that it's permanent all-wheel drive. So, you're always sending torque to all four wheels. It's not like an on-demand system like a lot of SUVs in this segment. If you do wanna do a little bit of light off-roading, you've got enough ground clearance to do the very basic stuff. And then down here, you have X-Mode. So, X-Mode allows you to go between dirt, gravel, and also snow modes, and that's gonna vary your stability control and how the torque is delivered to each wheel. Yeah, it works well. Flick of this switch enables that. It tells you that it's enabled as well, and then you push it once again to go back to normal mode. And then finally, on the steering wheel, you have Subaru's version of Sport Mode, which is S and I. Push the S button, you get sharper throttle response, a little bit more oomph, but not a great deal of changes compared to what it's like in just normal mode. Let's talk visibility. This is probably the thing I love the most about the Forester. You can actually see beautifully at the front sides, you get big wing mirrors, there's plenty of visibility out the back. The car itself feels so airy in here that it just feels a lot bigger than the rest of the competitors in this segment. So, Subaru has certainly nailed the packaging and the visibility you get as part of that. Okay, Subaru Forester. I'm so disappointed because I really like the Forester, but it has been completely let down by this hybrid system. It's such a poor implementation, and you would have thought with Toyota's input and Toyota's ownership of the company, they could have at least leant on Toyota's engineers to refine this system. It's so clunky and unpredictable that it really ruins the driving experience. It robs you of range because it has a smaller tank, you don't get as much towing capacity, and the fuel economy really isn't that good. So, what do you do? If you do want desperately a hybrid, go the RAV4. That is a much better car in every single way, but if you are set on a Subaru, and a lot of people are, there's a lot of repeat purchases with Subaru, just get the one that's the non-hybrid. You're getting a bigger fuel tank, you're getting the same benefits of the interior, it's beautiful to drive, you just don't have to deal with that clunky hybrid system. So, let us know in the comments below if you were looking at this and whether you're dissuaded or whether you bought one. Does it get any better with time? Is it like a whine? Let me know in the comments below. Now, if you have found this video useful, please don't forget to subscribe, hit the like button, and also press the bell icon, because that's going to tell you every single time we review a new car. But until next time, take it easy.