The Subaru Impreza lost its edge when it lost its manual gearbox

Modern Australians are too impatient, distracted or incompetent to change gears themselves - and that’s a shame for the once mighty Subaru Impreza.

Stephen Corby

3 min read

12:00AMMarch 30, 2024

The Weekend Australian Magazine

Subaru Impreza 2024

Human beings now have an attention span shorter than that of a goldfish – 8.25 seconds for the average person (down by 4.25 seconds since the year 2000, and falling fast) versus 9.0 seconds for the fish. This leaves me with some serious questions about how they measure a goldfish’s attention span – do they use a cat, or show it episodes of Shark Week on Discovery Channel? Is there a fishy TikTok?

Obviously our calamitous attention deflation worries me personally, because the average person under 30 isn’t going to get through the first 420 words of waffle before I mention the car. But the side effect I fear we fail to consider is that someone with a short attention span is also a hugely impatient asshole. I found my own lack of patience insufferable in the week I recently spent with a car I really wanted to love, the Subaru Impreza. I have always adored Subarus and if I’d ever had the money I would have bought an Impreza WRX, or even a Liberty wagon, and been very happy with it.

Every time I head off to drive a Subaru I expect to enjoy the experience (particularly when it’s an Impreza Hatch like this one; it’s lack of SUV-ness thrills me) and mourn the lack of one in my life, but the problem here was that it just wasn’t fast enough. I’m not talking about its speed off the line (although 10.8 seconds to go from zero to 100km/h is unpleasantly pedestrian), or its mid-range punch, I’m talking about how long it took for the car to boot-up the Apple CarPlay and start belting out either my teens’ incessant music (and why is it that you bring up your children the right way, prioritising Beatles over Wiggles and Springsteen over Spice Girls, and they just wilfully choose to like artists of their own?) or, more importantly, my podcasts.

Every time I head off to drive a Subaru I expect to enjoy the experience …

Now, it probably doesn’t take minutes, but gosh it’s a lot of seconds, far too many, frankly (OK, I just went out and timed it – 24 seconds, which is roughly a year in modern terms). Enough that I would regularly start stabbing at the giant 11.6-inch touchscreen and shouting the way Lleyton Hewitt probably does at his kids (COME ON!). This behaviour makes as much sense as slapping the lift button repeatedly when you want the elevator to come faster, which I’m pretty sure people do even more often now than they did in 2000.

This technological knockdown aside, I did enjoy a lot of things about the Impreza, and I even managed to get used to holding the plastic steering wheel of the base model 2.0L I was driving, because it does look and feel a bit sporty and purposeful, and at least distantly related to my beloved WRX versions.

The offending interface of the Subaru Impreza.

As usual, Subaru’s symmetrical all-wheel-drive system provides excellent grip and go in all conditions; the steering, handling and ride are all top-shelf, and generally the Impreza was an almost pleasant companion for the coastal weekend away I threw it at (the boogie board just fit in the boot, too). I say almost because while the 2.0-litre four-cylinder boxer engine does just barely enough, with its 115kW and 196Nm, the whole party is ruined, once again, by the CVT gearbox. If a CVT did attend your party it would stand in the middle of the room and make unpleasant grunting sounds, which would then turn into Yoko Ono-style screams and would in no way align with the background music, conversation or any kind of social niceties.

The Subaru’s CVT is particularly awful when you ask the car to overtake, drive up steep hills or do anything more than simple cruising. It can be OK around town, but only if you’re never in a hurry.

The great shame here is that the same car with a manual gearbox would undoubtedly be 900 per cent more enjoyable to drive, but Subaru has axed that previously excellent and well-engineered option because modern Australians are too impatient/distracted/incompetent to change gears themselves.

Fortunately, late in our week together, I decided to press the Sport button, which had seemed a little pointless in a car with 115kW – like asking an old person to turn up their hearing aids when they clearly never turn them on – and it did make a pleasant difference, keeping the car more on its toes and thus requiring less god-awful whingeing from the CVT.

Now, it’s just possible that I’m expecting too much from this Impreza Hatch, considering it is the entry-level offering, yours for a reasonable $31,490, but the fact is I hold Subarus to a higher standard, and that 24 seconds of thinking your infotainment system has curled up and died every time you turn the car on is about 23.5 seconds too long, frankly.