My Subaru knows it’s getting sold. It has looked, forlornly, at my recent press cars and has deduced that its hours are numbered. In exchange, it is haunting me with the most annoying issues on the way out the door.
If you’re new here: I bought a 2016 Subaru Forester (2.5, Premium, with the cold weather package) brand new in 2016. I’d reviewed one and, of all the crossovers for sale in 2016, I felt like it was good at just about everything even if not particularly great at any one thing. While I was tempted to get a Mazda CX-5, prices for Foresters were a lot lower at the time and I got a great deal on one so I pulled the trigger.
Plus, I thought, it should have the same approximate quality over time as the Honda we’d previously had. I was wrong.
Extremely wrong! As mentioned back in February, I have come to regret buying the car after too many issues for a vehicle that gets treated well and isn’t that old. I’ve had to replace the front suspension, the rear wheel bearings, and a million headlights, all before hitting 75,000 miles. The wheel studs are notorious for cracking off and, lo and behold, one just snapped off recently.
To add insult to injury, the already bad speakerphone is almost indecipherable and the Subaru’s infotainment system feels super laggy now. I could live with all of this a little longer, but now I’ve hit yet another speed bump (but not an actual speed bump because I’m tired of this car being unable to maintain an alignment).
Are You Kidding?
Not since John Densmore has anyone been madder at some doors.
Specifically, the locks on the front passenger door stopped working for some reason a few weeks ago. I clicked the unlock button on my keyfob and nothing happened. I clicked it again and heard the hollow, unsatisfying clink of all the other locks meekly opening, but no noise emanated from the passenger door.
I walked around to the driver-side door, found it was open, and peered in to see the passenger door was still stuck in the locked position. Oh well. I clicked it by hand and then hit the lock button. Of course, nothing happened. So I went in and locked it by hand.
For the next week or so I couldn’t defeat muscle memory so I kept going to the door and finding it either locked or unlocked depending on whatever the opposite of what I wanted happened to be. And then, when I got used to it, it started working again.
Whew. One less thing!
And then, a few days ago, the driver-side door decided to stop working.
One wonky lock is bad luck, two is bad design.
“Those Subarus are starting to age, their crap, cheap build quality is starting to shine through,” SWG told me in an effort to cheer me up. “That one I recently rescued was a mess of cheap snapped bolts/fasteners etc with the work I had to do to it and it was a rust-free southern car.”
And before you ask, it’s not the keyfob.
Otherwise, the rear doors wouldn’t work and, to this point, they still work.
I Am Too Over It To Fix It
Just to make it exciting, this doesn’t seem to be a consistent issue. Sometimes both doors work, and sometimes neither do. Sometimes it’s just one.
Assuming it’s the lock actuator it’s not the worst possible job:
But, as you can see, Subaru hasn’t made it exactly easy for a regular person to do.
Is this just me? As always, the SubaruForester.org forum seems to have plenty of examples of people having this issue:
And:
And:
As always, you can pretty much find any problem online if you just search for it, so I try to keep my browsing to specific forums like this one and NASIOC and only include the screenshots if there are enough to make it seem common. This is common and people claim to have been charged $700 for the repair, which I assume is mostly the annoying labor.
Am I being a little precious about my eight-year-old car? Just a little. All old cars have weird issues (and some new ones do as well). I just feel like the issue-per-mile is a little too high for my taste and the solutions always seem to require just a bit more work to fix than I’m used to having previously owned Volvos, Fords, and Hondas.
If all goes well I’ll have this sold and out of my life before the end of the month, so hopefully nothing else significant happens to it between now and then. I’m out, Subaru!
8 years isn’t even old, these issues are inexcusable.
Matt, I think you should drive this across the country to LA, where the Forester should be traded in at Galpin for the Maverick you’ve been pining for…
And then David should review it as part of his trade-in series and be the impartial judge pf whether the car or the owner is to blame for this divorce haha
Was always a Subaru fan. But our 2013 Outback killed it for me. It wasn’t a BAD car. It just wasn’t a very good car. Loud, inefficient, the most uncomfortable seats, crappy materials, bad infotainment, not great build quality. Nothing objectively wrong with it, just nothing to recommend it.
We’d bought it thinking we would drive it into the ground. Instead sold it during the pandemic and bought a Volvo before prices went insane. Volvo has been 100% a better vehicle.
Man this is just some bad luck. I also had the 2016 Forester, except the XT so I’m a little better than you. and ZERO problems. Right up until a drunk driver at a high speed ran a red light and T boned my daughter in an intersection. And she was all right. It was a horrific crash and she was injured but in a number of other cars she would have been killed. Say what you will, it will always go down in my book as one of the greatest cars ever
that it’s what subaru stand up
Subaru started going downhill around 2010 or so. 90’s was peak Subaru.
I remember test driving a 2011 Forester. It definitely ranks among one of the worst cars I’ve driven (and I’ve driven hundreds of cars). The quality was so bad I could scarcely believe it was a 21st century product.
Just look to the values of first US gen STI’s to find what the US considers peak Subaru. 05-07 routinely ask in the $20Ks where I am. Lower mileage 08+ often go for less than that. I happen to drive an ’06 turbo Saabaru though so I may be biased.
Just rotated the tires on my BRZ for the first time and snapped off a lug bolt, whoever had it off last had cross threaded it. Very annoying though not the cars fault. But I have heard similar whoes about soft lugs from the BRZ groups, so we will see how it goes. Unlike the Forester though the BRZ brings me constant joy so it could have a lot more problems before I’d be more than a little bothered. But yeah, if you want Honda/Toyota reliability you still gotta buy a Honda or Toyota.
Yeah but our BRZ interiors and electronics and top end of the motor, are all Toyota! So it’s already the best Subaru!
I had a door lock actuator go bad on my 2014 Impreza when it was about 6 years old. Annoying, but I was able to DIY replace it without too much hassle… until I got the door panel back on and learned that I somehow broke the power window switch during the repair process. Also had a small oil leak, failed O2 sensor, and failed brake light switch during my 8 years of ownership. None of these were devastating, but definitely not up to the quality standards of my prior Toyota or Honda.
I’ve replaced this in one door of my 05 Legacy, the little motor in the actuator failed. You can buy the whole actuator for several hundred $ or get just the motor on ebay for $5. But that involves opening up the actuator and getting very greasy. The grease Subaru used is garbage.
What are you going to get?
Asking the important questions.
Matt, Check the price offers from Carmax and Caravan. I was surprised how much more they offered on our Audi Q3 than the selling dealer. Sold it last month without any trouble at all. Just run it through a good carwash, with all the extras.
I have sold four cars to CarMax and they exceeded my expectations every time.
Nobody dismisses issues as easily as diehard Subaru owners. It blows my mind. They have so many simple quality of life issues and people who own them are just like “well I am on my second engine, 3rd CVT, and the locks are iffy but I love the car!”. I can say I have noticed several former diehards recently started to seem less sure. One of of longtime friends who was a diehard Subaru fanatic just decided to not get another one after selling his Outback right when it left warranty at 100k.
Have you met Toyota owners?
….I really hope that depends on what particular model they own, because my Prius really has been trouble-free so far.
But we have covered some Toyota Achilles’ heels here before….I think.
If the maybe dozens of stories of the blown gen 3 headgaskets I’ve read on r/Prius and PriusChat applied to every gen 3, I think it’d be much bigger news, rather than just the negativity bias you’d associate with model-specific forums.
Which isn’t to say it’s not a problem, because it is! But there’s gen 3 Priuses at 300,000+ miles on the original engine, and I already got my EGR cleaned out once preventatively at 140,000 miles to hopefully postpone that. Was certainly cheaper than a timing belt!
….that does make some sense, and is also mildly comforting since I generally drive way more highway than city miles.
I got mine at 115,000 as the 4th owner. I swear the prior owners must have just gotten bored because it was pristine when I got it at the dealership and it still is, mostly.
Thanks for your input.
I would think, say, the Camry and Corolla owners would be the most “valid” in being Toyota fans. But hey, this Prius is my first Toyota and it’s way under my old Ford Econoline’s maintenance by several times over. But then, they’re the only two vehicles I’ve ever owned, so not exactly a good dataset.
*Volkswagen has entered the chat*
I have a friend who now owns a 2009 Ford Focus, who owned a Jetta until a deer kamikazed onto their hood on a freeway over a Jersey barrier.
They are, shall we say, a recovering Volkswagen fan.
We were actually planning to meet up for me to replace their headlights with LEDs (since apparently the halogens kept dying) and after looking up how to replace them, I was dreading it. The deer happened before we actually met up.
pre-2005 Subaru owners are exempt from the rules. I do enjoy them.
Seriously Matt, functioning door locks are kind of important and you are not being precious. I mean no offense, but your car is a POS. David’s ancient Aztek will probably last longer than it. 😉
Of course, I say this without consideration of the fact that changing cars costs real money, but I do hope you get a new whip soon. (Sienna, Sienna, Sienna)
Must feel good to be moving on.
These years of Subarus (as well as the previous generation) have such an intolerable list of problems for such mediocre appliance vehicles.
Ours was generally okay on the small stuff, but counting the current owner, is on its second engine, and has had the engine removed from the vehicle THREE times. And I don’t think it’s even rolled 200 thousand KM.
How on hell can someone manage to get pissy against John Densmore?
I see you’ve never known anyone in a band.
Well, you are right.
But it’s normally the drummers keeping the whole thing together. We manage our egos fairly better than the frontmen.
I don’t know how they have such a loyal following anymore. I used to love Subaru, but I’ve never owned one with AWD and they were a lot more reliable and durable back then. The mk1 Legacy did have a design issue with the front door locks where a small plastic tab held the anchor end of a spring for lock actuation. When that tab broke off from age, the spring would then use the lock button as its anchor, holding the door locked, necessitating pushing it (hard) into the unlocked position while pulling the handle to open the door and the door couldn’t be opened from outside (or maybe there was a trick with the key, I can’t recall). Fix was probably 15 minutes removing the door card and the latch mechanism (or maybe the door card didn’t have to be removed, I forget), then drilling a set of holes across the plastic housing to insert a thick metal wire/thin rod to replace the broken tab that anchored the spring. Couldn’t see the fix, either, so it didn’t even show itself. Funny thing was, when the passenger side went, it was at the end of a terrible date with someone’s future trophy wife, locking her in when she was in as much of a hurry to get out as I was to see her leave. I made a joke about it that fell flat and told her what the problem was and how to get out, but it appeared to acquire too much brain power (or further listening to me), so I had to awkwardly reach across and do it for her. The timing of that was too hilarious and that was just one of many odd things that happened with that car that makes me swear to this day that it had a personality.
That part with your date is pure literature. Are you John Irving, by the way?
Not so skilled, but I am a fiction writer.
Hello there, fellow writer! What do you write about? Where can I read your job?
Literary fiction. Right now, I’m working on a trilogy that kids can read, though it takes place in the same universe as all my books, the rest of which are very adult. I didn’t write it for kids, I just wrote it as something that I would have wanted to read as a kid who enjoyed mythology, original versions of fairy tales, and classics that were decidedly darker than the stuff they give kids now that I would have hated. I guess I’m outing myself, but the first one is “Sloth and Good Boy”, which is published and can be found online or ordered anywhere. It’s the adventures of a Bradypus sloth, German Shepherd, and a large goat, with the first book loosely based on “The Odyssey”. In the later books, I add in some people since it gets far too complicated for the animals to understand and convey through their POV and the people drive the stories as the animals would otherwise have no reason to go on these adventures. I have the second one back from my editor and he has the third one in hand, so—hopefully—”Thundersloth!” and “The Curse of the Lost Galleon” will be out before the end of the year.
You have anything out?
It looks impressive! I just read the Google Books comment, and your books are something that I would absolutely love my nephews and niece to read.
I wrote poetry and short narrative (in some cases translated from Spanish to English and viceversa: https://lucasgilardone.wordpress.com/), and four novels of rather political fiction.
My first novel (Había banderitas por todos lados) tells the history of dark politics in Argentina between 1976 and 2010, with a fictional character interacting with historic ones (through Dirty War, the Malvinas War, the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, the death of Nestor Kirchner).
The second one (El testigo de la Patria) is sort of a sequel of one of Osvaldo Soriano’s last novels, the mad escape of a forgotten, unemployed secret agent with a robotized hero from our Independence, from Paris to Budapest, through the Balkans (in a Citroen 2CV) to Argentina.
The third novel (La tregua había terminado) tells the story of a small town lawyer trying to defend an innocent man as a cloud of political conspiracy starts to cover them. I used different tools on this one: omniscent narrative, journalistic articles, judicial documents.
The last one (La memoria de Rosendo) is about an absurd man with a bad memory that writes down everything. Hired as a driver for a corrupt politician, he begins to fill notebooks with the roadmap of bribery and extortion, until those notebooks appear in the hands of a prosecutor and a journalist. This case mirrors a scandal for which a former Argentine president is about to go to trial, but in my novel it is set in Rio de Janeiro.
To nobody’s surprise, what my characters drive describe exactly who they are and what stage of their lives they are on (example: https://www.amazon.com/TESTIGO-PATRIA-Spanish-LUCAS-GILARDONE-ebook/dp/B0C1HWR3Y9).
That all sounds pretty cool! I’m thinking of placing my next series (that ties all the various ones together into a kind of sci-fi future) on the mountainous Pacific coast of South America (though more north as the Darien Gap plays a big role as well as the Amazon), so that might be some good reading for me.
Funny about the guy with bad memory. I have a 1/2 finished book (“Plum Crazy” after the Dodge color, though it features a 440 ‘Cuda owned by weapon dealing clowns) that the animal stories interrupted that’s a 1st person dark humor noir with an unreliable narrator who has confabulation. He’s writing the story as it unfolds so he doesn’t misremember things, though he’s never quite sure and anything that he mentions that happened earlier is also suspect.
That project looks awesome, looking forward to know about it.
The description of the other book is absurdly nuts, I love it!
“someone’s future trophy wife…”
“required too much brain power (or further listening to me)…”
I may have also dated her for a while (I was 21 and more interested in her other “qualities”). Mine needed multiple attempts to understand the server flag at a Brazilian steak house (green end up, “bring more food”; red end up, “stop bringing food”; laying down, “check please”) and got mad at me when she couldn’t understand it..
I wasn’t much older than that. She was very attractive, though I need to be able to connect with someone to want to go anywhere and we were neither’s type. Three-headed dogs with odd jobs aren’t for everyone.
My 2012 Forester overheard me talking to my wife about trading it in so it lit up the dash like a Christmas tree. I’ve got check engine, traction control, and blinking cruise lights now to guide me on my way. I pulled the codes only to discover that those codes can be caused by a long list of issues! Yay!
Usually one of the wheel speed sensors in my experience. It’s wack a mole trying to determine which one. I’ve fixed two in the last three years and the Christmas tree is back again this spring. I do beleive it is due to my driving the thing less than 3k a year. It’s feeling neglected and is demanding attention.
Lots of newer cars will light up the traction control if the check engine light comes on. My first experience with this was when my V6 RAV4’s dash lit up like the proverbial Christmas tree.
My 2010 Outback does something similar, all of those plus blinking BRAKE (the parking brake indicator–not the scary one). The code I get is P0420, which means one of the catalytic converters is no longer as good as new. So far I’m just resetting it when it happens. I feel frustrated that I may have to put money into it to stop it happening…
I was clearing the codes, but they come back eventually and it seems like it’s still running fine so I’m just rolling with it. I’m getting rid of this thing soon-ish, so I’m not really interested in investing money into whatever problem it’s having. I’ll try a well-timed code clearing when it’s time for the trade in LOL.
Makes sense! FYI, if you don’t know already, the procedure to retrain the ECU after clearing the codes is to just let it sit and warm up. I didn’t know that at first, but would hate to sell a car that drives like mine does with an untrained ECU!
They’re named Outback because that’s where you take them to ease everyone’s suffering.
Lol, same thing with our 2011, it was the catalytic converter, ruined from oil leaking through the head gaskets into the cylinder.
Maybe your car just stood-up too fast. At least that’s what happens to me if I stand-up too fast…
And my Audi Allroad (the car that everyone loves to hate, and the car that’s supposed to be the worst one ever built by any manufacturer!) hasn’t had one issue. Period. In fact, I just added another one to the fleet – a 2018 with 14K on it. We do like our Audis…..
A 2018 allroad is a different beast from the hefty, air-suspensioned, twin-turboed A6 wagon that broke so many hearts, including mine. Still I make the Sign of the Cross when I see a surviving one.
My brother just bought a 4-year-old Outback. He didn’t ask my advice; I’d have steered him away. He was dead set on a wagon (I don’t blame him), and his previous Jetta wagon was a pile that he suffered with for years. Early on I tried to steer him toward a P3 Volvo, but he wanted a new car and late model Volvos are $$$$.
He has a one-year-old, and he told me he’s hoping to teach him to drive in this Subie. I told him to keep up on the tranny fluid changes and undercarriage washes. He only drives like 5K miles a year, hopefully it holds up and doesn’t rot away.
I will be surprised if he still has the car when the child hits double-digits.
You know its funny, my family owned subarus from the 1970s to the early 2000’s. (Spokane used to be SubaruTown). All in all, with all of the neglect those poor cars suffered, they did very well. The real thing that stopped us from buying them was, you guessed it, the goddamn 2.5 blowing head gaskets. Our 99 Outback blew its first head gasket at approximately 130,000 miles or so, climbing Stevens Pass. My dad had one of those “JDM” engines put in, and a few years later, in the EXACT SAME SPOT on Stevens pass, it blew again. We were done after that.
The issue is clearly Stevens Pass…or perhaps Leavenworth? The mere proximity to a faux German town caused your car to pitch a BMW-esque fit.
Hah! Could be. Could also be the SOOB didn’t want to fulfill its destiny as a ski-car, and wanted to go back to the warmth of lower elevations.
Funnily enough, our previous Subarus were still running around YEARS later after we got rid of them. The 82 is still on the road as far as I can tell, a coach for my high school bought it, and I’d always see it. The 88 ended up miles away in Monroe, we were thrilled to see it scooting around roughly a decade after we sold it.
Reading this and thinking about my now 10 year old Land Rover LR4 that’s had exactly 2 issues over its 130k miles of service, both of which were taken care of by TSBs. Meanwhile back in 16 I had my grandfather buy a Forester of the same spec as yours so he’d have something reliable for his “last car.” He finally sold it last month and said he’d rather just be without a car than with that one. Learning from the Forester mistake I had my mother get a CX-5 turbo a few years ago and it’s been perfectly flawless. Of these 3 automotive choices, the Subaru was the one I expected to be the smartest decision, but was by far the worst
Crazy, right? Those Mazdas have held up pretty well anecdotally.
We have a 2017 Mazda3 and a 2018 CX-5 (both since new) and have had literally ZERO issues. I can’t believe the list of problems you’re having with a car that’s only one year older than my 3.
I remember when Subaru used to make amazing cars (I nearly bought one myself), how the mighty have fallen 🙁