Subaru Crosstrek review

Make and model: Subaru Crosstrek
Description: Small petrol mild-hybrid SUV
Price range: £35,995 to £38,100, plus optional extras

Summary: The Subaru Crosstrek is safe, rugged and genuinely capable away from tarmac, but it feels badly dated and is neither comfortable nor enjoyable to drive.

For a broader ownership picture, see our full Subaru Crosstrek Expert Rating.

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Introduction

The Crosstrek is Subaru’s current small SUV, following on from two generations of the Subaru XV that filled the same role for more than a decade.

As with most Subarus, it does things rather differently from mainstream rivals. Permanent all-wheel drive is standard, ground clearance is generous and there’s proper off-road hardware, rather than the cosmetic ruggedness you’ll find on most small SUVs.

That gives the Crosstrek a genuine reason to exist. If you regularly deal with muddy tracks, rough roads, steep driveways or bad winter weather, it offers capability that most rivals simply don’t have.

Unfortunately, almost everything else feels like it’s come from another era.

After a week with the Crosstrek, I found very little to enjoy. The engine and automatic gearbox are noisy and sluggish, the suspension is excessively bouncy, the steering is vague and the cabin looks and feels years behind newer rivals.

Subaru still has a loyal following, and that off-road ability will suit some buyers perfectly. But if you don’t specifically need it, there are far better cars for the money.

Price and equipment

The Crosstrek starts at £36K for the Limited model, while the Touring version tested here costs a little over £38K. That’s a lot of money for a small SUV that feels so dated, although the standard equipment list is respectable.

Limited models get 17-inch alloy wheels, heated front seats, dual-zone climate control, an 12-inch touchscreen, wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, reversing camera, keyless start, adaptive cruise control and a long list of driver assistance systems.

Touring adds larger wheels, synthetic leather upholstery, electric adjustment for the driver’s seat, built-in navigation, extra USB ports, a sunroof, steering-wheel gearshift paddles and a more advanced version of Subaru’s X-Mode off-road system.

Permanent all-wheel drive is standard on both versions, along with a generous 22cm of ground clearance. That’s unusual in the family car market, and is the strongest argument for buying a Crosstrek if you regularly head off the tarmac.

If you don’t need those things, the case for the Crosstrek becomes much harder. Nearly £40K buys some very accomplished SUVs these days, and most of them feel two generations newer inside.

Inside the car

The Crosstrek’s cabin is probably where its age shows most clearly. It feels solid enough – and Subaru has traditionally cared more about durability than fashion – but the materials, displays and general presentation look old compared with almost anything launched recently.

The steering wheel is covered in leather-look material that doesn’t feel particularly pleasant in your hands. It’s also packed with buttons, although at least they’re clearly marked and you can work out what they do without consulting a manual.

The 12-inch vertical touchscreen dominates the centre console, but the graphics and interface look like they belong in a much older car. There are physical temperature buttons alongside the screen, which sounds encouraging, except the actual temperature setting appears on the screen itself. So you still have to look away from the road to see what you’re adjusting. The climate control is powerful enough, but the mixture of screen controls and surrounding buttons isn’t especially intuitive.

The automatic brake hold function is another irritation. It’s buried in the touchscreen and needs to be switched on again every time you start the car. There doesn’t appear to be any way of simply telling the car to leave it on.

Ahead of the driver are conventional analogue dials with a small digital display between them. There’s no head-up display, although Subaru has a row of warning lights on top of the dashboard for the collision warning system.

The seats are comfortable enough, but they don’t offer much side support. The Touring model also gets a small conventional sunroof, which feels distinctly old-fashioned now that panoramic glass roofs have become common.

Rear-seat space is decent, and the Crosstrek is easy to get in and out of. Boot space is less impressive at 315 litres, expanding to 922 litres with the rear seats folded. That’s well below what many similarly priced cars offer.

On the road

This is where the Crosstrek really struggles. The 2.0-litre petrol engine produces 136hp and is paired with a continuously variable automatic transmission (CVT), and it’s not a happy combination. Press the accelerator and the engine revs flare up, making plenty of noise without much corresponding increase in speed.

It’s a classic CVT problem, and the Crosstrek does nothing to disguise it. At times, the combination of the engine revving its head off and the suspension bouncing around made it feel like I was doing 60mph when I was actually travelling at 40.

The suspension is particularly disappointing. On a smooth road it’s fine, but then almost every modern car is fine on a smooth road. Once the surface deteriorates or there are any kind of undulations in the road, the Crosstrek becomes bouncier than a bouncy castle. Our ten-year-old rear passenger felt quite queasy after half a mile on one of the particularly nasty local roads near our house.

The steering is equally uninspiring. It’s light and vague, with very little sense of what the front wheels are doing. People regularly criticise EVs for numb steering, but this petrol car certainly doesn’t feel any more connected to the road.

There’s very little engine braking, either. Lift off the accelerator and the car hangs onto its speed for longer than expected. The Touring model has steering-wheel paddles that let you select simulated gearbox ratios (as a CVT has no gears), but using them to slow the car mostly generates more noise rather than much useful retardation.

Road noise itself is fairly average. The tyres aren’t especially large, which helps, so the Crosstrek is neither notably quiet nor particularly noisy at a steady cruise.

The forward collision warning is another story. It repeatedly flashed warnings and beeped at me when there was no obvious danger. On longer corners, the system sometimes seemed to think an approaching car in the opposite lane was about to crash head-on into me. It also warned about parked cars while I was simply following the road around them.

All the warnings are more distracting than reassuring, which is unfortunate because safety is one of the Crosstrek’s genuine strengths.

Mild hybrid system and fuel economy

Subaru describes the Crosstrek’s engine as an e-Boxer hybrid, but this isn’t a hybrid in the way most buyers would understand something like a Toyota hybrid.

The electrical assistance is very mild. The car can switch the petrol engine off while coasting if there’s enough charge in its very small battery, but touch the accelerator and the engine immediately restarts. For example, while coasting downhill at about 50mph, the engine shut down and the dashboard displayed “EV mode”. As soon as I touched the accelerator again, the petrol engine restarted.

To its credit, the transition is very smooth. There’s no shunt or hesitation as the engine wakes up, but this isn’t meaningful electric driving. The electric side of the system is there to assist the petrol engine and trim fuel consumption, rather than propel the car for any useful distance. It’s easier, and more realistic, to just think of it as a petrol car with a little bit of electrical help.

Official fuel economy is about 37mpg, with CO₂ emissions of 174g/km. Both of those are in the bottom half of the pile in this sector of the market.

Ownership

The Subaru Crosstrek currently holds a D-grade New Car Expert Rating in our unique Expert Rating Index, with a score of 58%. Its Used Car Expert Rating is also D-grade, at 60%.

Safety is its strongest area. The Crosstrek scored a five-star Euro NCAP rating two years ago, which equates to a B-grade for safety in our Expert Rating Index.

Most of its other scpores are disappointing. Green NCAP awarded it two stars (out of five) for its eco credentials, scoring reasonably well for low levels of local pollution but poorly for greenhouse gases, thanks to its high level of CO₂ emissions.

Warranty cover is also about the bare minimum. Subaru provides three years or 60,000 miles of new car cover, while the hybrid battery is covered for eight years or 100,000 miles. Three years now looks poor when several mainstream rivals offer five, seven or even eight years of cover.

Service intervals are every 12 months or 12,000 miles, which is about average.

The review score reflects our week with the car. The Expert Rating gives the broader ownership picture by combining a dozen different media reviews with safety, running costs, warranty and reliability information.

Verdict

The Subaru Crosstrek is hard to recommend unless you genuinely need what makes a Subaru different. Its permanent all-wheel drive, high ground clearance and four-wheel-drive systems give it real off-road capability that most small SUVs can’t match. Safety is strong, rear-seat space is decent and it feels solidly built.

But everyday driving exposes too many weaknesses. The engine and transmission are noisy and sluggish, the suspension is bouncy, the steering is vague and the cabin looks badly dated. The driver assistance systems can also be far too jumpy, particularly the forward collision warning.

And then there’s the price. At nearly £40K for the Touring, this isn’t a cheap car you can excuse for being unsophisticated.

If you live somewhere rural and regularly deal with mud, snow, rough tracks or steep terrain, the Crosstrek may still make sense. Subaru has a loyal audience for good reason, and few rivals offer the same combination of compact dimensions and genuine all-wheel-drive capability.

For everyone else, I struggle to see the appeal. If I arrived at a rental desk and they handed me the keys to one, I’d ask what else they had.

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