With all due respect to our friends at Toyota, we have driven
the car for Gen Y and although it begins with an “S”
it isn’t a Scion. It’s Subaru. Specifically, the
Impreza 2.5 sedan.
First of all, there’s the overall design. Bug-eyed
headlamps. A spoiler that resembles nothing more than a warped
skateboard. Subaru has tapped Lance Armstrong to be its
spokesman. They ought to consider adding Tony Hawk. It is a
four-door sedan. While it probably doesn’t have the
container space of a Scion xA, you can still roll four-deep and
have stuff in the trunk (there’s 11-ft3 back
there).
And, most important, as this is a Sube, you’ve got
full-time four-wheel drive working for you, which is a plus.
Especially in places where it snows. The Impreza has an
all-aluminum, boxer-style 16-valve, 2.5-l engine that provides
165 hp @ 5,600 rpm and 166 lb.-ft. of torque @ 4,000 rpm. The
version we drove had a five-speed manual. Which is exactly what
you’d want in it. (Speaking of winter: when we had the
car, Detroit was in one of those weeks of brutally cold temps.
No car in memory has warmed up faster than this one, which makes
it deserving of high marks for that alone.)
The interior is suitable in terms of materials: adequate
cloth and vinyl. Nothing fancy. Nothing hideous. And for
being a comparatively small car (99.4-in. wheelbase), the
driver’s seat, although a reclining bucket, provides
sufficient vertical lift so that you don’t feel dwarfed by
the SUVs that surround one on the road today. But the interior
is where we have the quibbles. For one thing, the in-dash cup
holder is just this side of being completely useless. Given the
stiff ride (four-wheel-independent suspension notwithstanding),
there was a geyser-like explosion of coffee through the little
hole in the cup’s lid upon hitting a bump. My passenger
was not amused. And although there is an AM/FM/CD standard sound
system, the buttons are way too small to be worked by anyone
wearing gloves, unless the objective is to get random stations.
The vehicle that the aforementioned group would really like
to get its hands on is the WRX. Which costs about $5K more than
the Impreza 2.5 (which is in the $19.5K vicinity). But for the
money, the Impreza is—yeah, we might as well go for the
cheap but accurate adjective—impressive.
