By AARON COLE
Managing Editor, MediaOne of Utah
I get the feeling the 2010 Subaru Outback is either inspired partially or wholly by Jerry Garcia.
(Or maybe I get the feeling I’m sitting too close to the exhaust pipes these days.)
Sure there’s the easy observation — more “Jerry Bear” stickers have made their way onto Subarus than have made their way onto black lights and lava lamps. But the connection runs deeper than that.Underneath the beard, glasses and ragged T-shirt, you’d be hard pressed to find a guy that could mash a Fender better than ol’ Jerry. If Jerry had looks only a mother could love, Mother needs thicker eyeglasses. But grungy looks aside, that guy could wail.
Back to the Outback. It’s clear that Subaru hasn’t exactly taken its signature, go-anywhere wagon avant garde here. How could they? From the beginning the Outback was more about where it could go rather than how it looked getting there. I dare you to build a five-passenger wagon with 9 inches of ground clearance. I guarantee you come out with something that looks closer to George Patton than George Clooney.
Remember the commercials with a grizzled Paul Hogan? Exactly.
But this year, like last year, Subaru let the interior reign supreme. Similar to Jerry, the folks from Fuji Heavy let the Outback play from the inside out by packaging all the rock and roll you’ll need between four wheels. Which is to say the Outback now features more room, more cargo capabilities and a better engine underneath the wagon exterior.
Hot? No. Helpful? Yes.
I’m being too harsh, because for whatever aesthetic shortcomings the Outback has, the new models make up for it with a wide swath of overall improvements.
First — and my favorite — Subaru finally heard the cries of its customers and offers the six-cylinder model without a premium gas requirement. The 3.6-liter flat six flavor supplants last year’s 3.0-liter that only drank the good stuff without losing any horsepower in the process. In fact, Subaru has engineered the six-cylinder to have a longer, flatter torque curve between 2,000 and 6,500 rpm, which gives it a smooth, calculated power delivery.
Thankfully, the bigger displacement doesn’t mean one will take it in the pants at the pump. This year’s six-cylinder model gets one more mpg than did last year’s; and the smallest Outback, the 2.5i with a continuously variable transmission, will break the 20 mpg barrier in the city and carry a carload of Dead Heads en route to the next show at a 30 mpg clip on the highway.
Second, Subaru pushed the wheels back and out in the Outback affording passengers another eight cubic feet of interior space without making the car any longer than it already is. In fact the Outback is actually two inches shorter than in previous years. Rear passengers have four extra inches of leg space and the cargo area grows by nearly six cubic feet when the seats are down.
Lastly, and almost more importantly, Subaru has kept the Outback from taking itself too seriously again this year. Despite the fact the Outback can tip the scales at more than $35,000 fully equipped with the six-cylinder engine and lots of goodies like our test model, you can still ride the Outback hard and put it away wet without feeling bad.
Dirty feet are welcome in the Outback. You can’t say that about many cars these days.
Of course the 2011 Outback benefits from Subaru’s standard blessings: all-wheel drive and enough ride height to tackle weekend excursions to the elevated hinterlands.
Call it fire up the mountain.
Aaron Cole is a syndicated auto columnist and managing editor of MediaOne of Utah, and has driven hundreds of new cars — but only briefly. By most accounts he is wrong and has proudly been banned on Internet message boards. Send complaints, compliments or supplemental income to aaron.m.cole@gmail.com
