2020 Subaru Impreza review & buyer's guide
The Subaru Impreza still pushes back against the Mazda3, takes the fight to Hyundai i30 and has Corolla beat in the performance and character stakes. But is it the right new car for you?
Subaru Impreza is fighting harda in one of the most price-sensitive and hotly contested segments in the car industry: The so-called 'small car' category.
And, yeah - I know they're not actually that small - it's just what they're called in the trade.
In a sense, Impreza is fighting with one hand tied behind its back (at least on price) because all model variants feature Symmetrical all-wheel drive and those extra driveline parts aren't cheap. And most model grades feature the awesome EyeSight safety system, and none of that tech is free, either.
These factors pump up the price - but they also make the car a compelling ownership proposition. But is it enough as its rivals have recently been updated.
Download: official Subaru Impreza specifications >>
The competition
Hyundai i30
Mazda3
Toyota Corolla
Unique advantages: Five-year warranty with unlimited kilometres. Offers both a diesel engine and a punchy 1.6-litre turbocharged petrol engine (150kW/265Nm) in N-Line and N-Line Premium variants. Hatch only body style.
More on Hyundai i30 >>
Unique advantages: Offers an even more potent 2.5-litre atmo petrol engine in the G25 GT & Astina (139kW/250Nm). Hatch and sedan body styles. Conventional epicyclic auto transmission refinement.
More on Mazda3 >>
Unique advantages: Strong hybrid drivetrain and, after years waiting behind the rest of the market, finally offers standard safety features like adaptive cruise and emergency braking. Also comes in hatch and sedan.
More on going hybrid >>
Subaru Impreza review
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If you're shopping for an Impreza-sized car:
I spent two weeks driving Impreza, both a week each in the sedan and hatch, (that's just the way the car industry rolls with evaluation vehicles) and I’ve got to say it’s ‘up there’ in this class of notionally 'small' car.
They're not really that small because there's a whole class of car below, which the industry refers to as 'compact' or ‘micro’.
If you're shopping around for a small-not-small car, there is an astounding choice , with around 30 models available today, incredibly enough. (How many can you name?)
So, instead of saying to yourself: ‘oh, I like that one, I might buy it’, which in my view, is the worse way to do this, let’s be rational for a few minutes. Thinking caps on.
Let’s look at the features and the unique points of difference offered by the various competitors, to make your selection, at least in part, based on objective criteria - not a whim.
Let’s run through what makes Impreza so impressive.
Points of difference
The two major points of difference with an Impreza, compared with most cars in the rest of the market, are the EyeSight® safety system and Symmetrical All-Wheel Drive. So let’s deal with both of those.
EyeSight
EyeSight® is a brilliant camera-based system. There’s two cameras (they’re just up here), they’re stereoscopic; they look at the road ahead. This gives you a bunch of safety features, like, forward collision mitigation so the car will warn you if it thinks you are about to crash into a car that’s stopped ahead. That’s brilliant. It’ll also stop for pedestrians at low speeds.
EyeSight also delivers adaptive cruise control (ACC), which is a huge plus for ordinary driving (not just for keeping you at stopping distance from a crash).
If you haven't driven a car with adaptive cruise control - which is getting rarer these days, admittedly - you really should give it a go. Unlike the conventional cruise control we’ve become adept at using over the last 20 years or so, adaptive cruise uses those EyeSight cameras to monitor the traffic ahead and increases or decreases your speed relative to a vehicle in front.
Let’s say you set the cruise to 110km/h on the freeway and you encounter some slow-moving congestion ahead. Perhaps a couple of trucks are doing 80km/h (a common scenario).
The car with ACC will automatically come up behind the congestion; it will identify this problem and then it will just adapt by slowing down and maintaining a safe, pre-determined following distance as set by you.
As the traffic opens up again, you’ll just automatically speed up again to the preset 110km/h. It happens seamlessly, without you doing anything you still have to monitor what the vehicle is doing, of course, because if you’ve entered an altered speed zone, and the traffic disipates, the ACC will speed up again, unaware of the changed speed/traffic conditions. Either way, it's a major benefit, it just doesn’t replace your cognitive task of being in control of the vehicle.
The brilliance of Subaru Impreza is that you get this adaptive cruise control functionality built-in with EyeSight® at about $29k plus on-road costs. Unfortunately for Impreza, adaptive cruise is now on the Mazda3 base model at the same price point, so it will be a matter of personal preference for whose system you can live with best. Subaru has been refining and tweaking EyeSight for years, whereas Mazda only made adaptive cruise available on the previous generation top-spec SP25 Astina.
But, today is today and Subaru has lost some of that lead it previously had, so if you plan on doing a lot of freeway driving in your new small car, I seriously recommend trying both systems. You might be surprised how good EyeSight really is.
SYMMETRICAL AWD
Symmetrical AWD is the huge advantage for Impreza. It means the tractive effort is maximised every time there’s a reduction in the amount of grip between tyre and road. When it rains, or you go to the snow, or you come across ice or frost, wet grassy slopes, mud or unsealed road, you’ve got the same amount of drive being transmitted to the road but it’s divided by four wheels instead of two. So, effectively, the grip level can drop by half and you can still keep going.
Many vehicles with AWD, notionally, are actually just front-drive most of the time and they wait for wheelspin to engage the AWD system. That’s so-called on-demand AWD, and while it’s an okay system, it’s really always playing catch-up because it has to wait for wheelspin before it does its thing. Often by the time it does kick in, it’s too late.
It also remains very difficult to find a car this size with AWD at these prices. Essentially you get the benefits of AWD that you would have in a big bulky SUV but you're paying something like $15-20k less - which is a major advantage and money saved.
Plus, you don’t get the additional bulk which requires harder acceleration (and poor handling) as a result, so there’s a fuel economy benefit as well.
Safety
Subaru took the bold decision, many years ago now, to make sure their cars earned five-star safety across the range, and were one of the first carmakers to do this.
They knew how important that would be to ordinary consumers, and it has certainly paid off. They’ve continued that with Impreza and unlike other makes and models which have had numerous revisions and prick-teased updating safety technology like it’s some kind of game with people’s lives, Subaru didn’t mess around.
Impreza was a five-star car from the start, and remains so in both active safety and crashworthiness criteria. You add it to the EyeSight system (above), and it’s still a brilliant, class-leading vehicle in terms of the safety systems on offer.
More on Subaru Impreza safety >> from ANCAP, plus the full ANCAP technical report on Impreza >>
On-par servicing, costs & warranty
Once upon a time, I was critical of Subaru’s service intervals. For may years, it was stuck at six months/ 10,000kms, whichever comes first, but it’s been increased to twelve months and 12,500km, whichever comes first for the last few years, which is nice. That’s pretty reasonable, if you don’t drive that far every year, - you’ll only be visiting the dealership once a year. Subaru said over the first three years of ownership, they cut just over $900 off servicing cost compared with the previous Impreza.
Servicing costs are as follows, as listed on Subaru’s website:
‘A Service’ (12,500kms/12 months) $350.25
'B' Service (25,000kms/24 months) $588.31
‘C’ Service37,500kms or 36 months $350.25
Total 3 Year Service Plan Price(including GST)$1288.81
‘D’ Service (50,000kms/48 months) $763.97
‘E’ Service (62,500kms/60 months) $354.86
Total 5 Year Service Plan Price(including GST)$2407.64
Platform & dynamics
This Impreza platform is Subaru’s global architecture and you can tell straight away that it’s very rigid. That’s good.
It’s an engaging, direct sort of drive experience, meaning it does what you tell it to do to, when you tell it to do it. It’s not disengaged from the road and is sumptuous in the way perhaps a Lexus is or even a Corolla in that ‘I just wanna get from A to B’ driving experience.
Most people test driving a car for the first time don’t spend enough time actually evaluating the car itself. Let’s face it, most people spend their lives routinely driving one or maybe two cars at a time - the same cars, day in, day out, for several years. But when you get in a new car, it feels extremely different, seductively so. The controls feel nicer, the steering feedback is better and the whole experience is light-years away from your old-jeans, A-to-B runabout.
That doesn’t even take us to the new technology compared to your old car - think cassette tapes to CDs, to Bluetooth.
So, the cognitive demands are high, and frankly, there's not a great deal of actual robust evaluation taking place, especially in the routine test drive around the block from the dealership.
Plenty of ‘reviews’ will mark Subaru down for a ‘dated’ interior - forgetting this current platform is barely five years old.
What I can tell you about the Impreza is that Subaru is really good at ergonomics, meaning all of the design and engineering factors regarding your interaction with the vehicle. It includes where are the controls placed - all the important bits within one finger’s reach, or as close to you as possible, and their instinctive operation. Does it take one action to turn something on, or do you have to think through setting something to the point it distracts you from the road? Does the car tell you what’s going on without overloading your ability to comprehend?
In the Impreza's case - yes. it does this all quite intuitively.
Your two central instrument displays convey only the important functions directly ahead of you in the dash cluster, and then there’s the centre stack and a secondary information display above that. All of that information is quite simple to glance at and you can accommodate the information almost straight away. So that’s really good.
Nobody’s going to accuse Impreza of being the most beautiful car you’ll ever see, either externally or internally. But certainly it’s ergonomic integration is absolutely brilliant. One of Subaru’s engineers once told me they intuitively prefer buttons on the steering wheel - which is why there’s so many - because that’s safer for the driver to use, rather than searching on the centre stack or hidden above your right knee on the dash panel. It makes perfect sense.
The steering wheel itself, for example, feels fantastic. You grab it and you go: ‘Yeah, WRX’s little brother… I can see that’. You’ve got the paddle shifters, if you want to drive the CVT as a manual. You’ve got umpteen buttons on that wheel, and I haven’t bothered counting them - there’s probably twenty - but it might take you a while to figure out what they all do. When you can play that wheel like a Stradivarius, it’s probably quite practical. Put the kettle on.
GPS
The top two spec levels of Impreza come standard with GPS and the news flash there is: it’s still TomTom. Thank heavens for that because in-house GPS systems designed in a bespoke way by carmakers are still typically awful. TomTom only does GPS; they know what they're doing, they do it very well. So, that’s a plus.
But if you’ve moved on and use your smartphone for everything, like nearly everybody else, you have Apple CarPlay® and Android Auto™ connectivity across the range.
Stay updated on the Impreza's full specs and features here >>
Engine & driveline
The Impreza, like the new Mazda3, offers one engine and one transmission. Except unlike the in-line four-cylinders in the Mzda or Corolla, the Impreza has a 2.0-litre Boxer petrol engine and a CVT. Now, on this CVT front, if you're in the market seriously considering Impreza, you're going to be watching 50 thousand different on-line reviews and a lot of those reviewers, historically, have been pretty critical of the CVT.
I think that’s unjustified.
Early CVTs tended to drone on and weren’t that engaging to drive, but I think Subaru’s done a great job tuning this current generation of CVT and, on objective criteria, you’d have to say that this CVT is as good as a good conventional automatic.
It’s not the same as a conventional auto, because it’s a different drive experience, but it’s got different strengths and weaknesses. Overall, if you put all the usual driveability factors into a blender, the smoothie coming out is going to leave you saying ‘it tastes about the same as a conventional automatic transmission’.
Most car reviewers suffer from a weapons-grade dose of confirmation bias when they assess CVTs. They look for reasons to hate the CVT and in this case, it’s completely unjustified. Often because they expect a CVT to drive like a regular auto or because they drive so many different cars the rational argument for the regular consumer - who doesn’t drive lots of different cars - gets lost in translation.
If you are confused about CVTs and even DCTs (dual-clutch transmissions) and DSGs (and all this nouveaux transmission terminology and technology generally) I demystified it here >>
Engine performance is kind of important as well. You can basically have any engine you want as long as it’s the 2.0-litre direct-injected Boxer petrol engine. The advantage is low centre of gravity because the pistons are operating horizontally. It's a Subaru thing; the boxer engine is one of the foundations of the brand.
The outputs are up there, compared with other leading 2.0-litre engines from competitors. It develops peaks of 115kW at 6000rpm and 196Nm at 4000rpm and it’ll run on standard 91 Octane unleaded fuel, not the expensive premium stuff. It’ll go better than and drink less fuel than any engine with the old style multi-point injection. If you're worried about keeping up with the Joneses, don’t be.
Obviously, though, it does not compete with the likes of Mazda's 2.5-litre SkyActive engine in the upmarket G25 Evolve, GT and Astina offering 139kW/252Nm. Nor does the Subaru 2.0 keep up with the 1.6-litre turbocharged engine in the Hyundai i30 N-Line and N-Line Premium pumping out 160kW/265Nm.
But there’s something to be said for even tyre wear with equal drive going to all four wheels, unlike the others punishing the fronts with braking, steering, tractive effort and power delivery.
Impreza's engine performance: does it measure up?
After posting the review at the top of this page I got quite a lot of comments on YouTube about the Impreza's straight line performance.
Comments like this:
"You briefly fairly glanced through the engine performance [in your review] :( Many reviewers commented a lack of power on highway or going uphill. That's the part I was looking forward to. You mentioned to test drive Kia Cerato, Hyundai i30 & Mazda3 as well, how come you didn't mention Corolla? Corolla is the hottest selling car in Australia." - Bernie J.
New Toyota Corolla, angrily redesigned and still boring. ‘How much styling do you want?’ ‘All of it!’
As for Corolla and why I don’t recommend it - it might be the best seller, but if you take out the sales to the rental fleets and other boring fleet sales, and to the blue rinse set who are on their 12th Corollas and just drive them down the street once a week for a perm and a Pimms, I think you'll find for the rest of us, Corolla is the automotive equivalent of a benzodiazepine thick shake.
As for Impreza's performance, there are two operant factors at play. One: Can you trust the reviews? And two: What do the numbers say? What are the objective facts about Impreza’s performance?
It’s interesting, because the internet has completely changed the nature of research. Things were different when I was a kid at university, of course, studying engineering, 66 million years ago, shortly after Gondwanaland broke up. I still remember it.
Toyota and the internet tells everyone Corolla is the best-seller. And even if it is, that doesn’t mean it’s the best buy for you, objectively.
It's easy to test drive any car - but forming the right comparative conclusions about things like relative performance takes research (and actual skill...)
Anyway … research. In the olden days the challenge was procuring the data. We had these places. Libraries, they were called, if memory serves. It was a chore and a half to post information in a library - but you could be pretty sure that information was accurate once it got there, given the hoops the author had to jump through to get it there.
Today, though … not so much. The challenge today is: we’re drowning in data, but we definitely each need an upgraded filtration system in the modern world - because there’s just so much uninformed bullshit to wade through, between you and the facts.
Let’s do a thought experiment in which you’re a car reviewer driving an Impreza and you say to yourself:
‘Seems a bit sluggish on the highway and uphill.’
It is of course okay to think this, but is that the end of the issue or the start of it? For most car reviewers it’s the end. However, if you don’t want to be a dipshit about this, I’d suggest it should be the start. Time to investigate. Because physics does not lie. It can support or refute your impression.
It takes kilowatts and Newton-metres to move kilos of metal against its own inertia and against gravity. And the relationship between those things is so simple a politician could almost understand it.
So is there any evidence beyond your finely calibrated dynamometer car-reviewing arse that supports your perception of this alleged Impreza sluggishness? And just how bad is this alleged performance deficit, quantifiably?
Impreza’s 2.0-litre engine peak output of 115 kilowatts at 6000rpm and 196 Newton Metres at 4000rpm is line-ball with Mazda’s 2.0-litre engine. There’s less than one per cent in it on peak power (Impreza’s way) and there’s two per cent in it in torque (Mazda’s way). Hyundai i30’s 2.0-litre makes four per cent more peak power, but slightly higher in revs, and four per cent more peak torque, but at a lot more revs.
In fact - the Subaru 2.0 boxer engine is absolutely up there with all other atmo 2.0-litre direct injection engines and goes harder than you're led to believe. The only conclusion you can draw from this is: whatever perception you’ve formed, it can’t be a consequence of engine performance. It really can’t.
Subaru AWD does require the installation of additional drivetrain components - and this provides additional traction in slippery conditions but it also adds considerable mass
But the Subaru does have all-wheel drive, and that requires a transfer case/centre diff to get the drive to the rear, plus a rear prop shaft, a rear diff and drive shafts. And they’ve got to weigh a bit. So maybe it’s that. Extra weight.
When you look at the power to weight ratios - which is something a lazy-arsed car reviewer would never do because it would mean interpreting actual numbers - you see the Subaru is at a slight disadvantage because of that additional mass.
A 2.0-litre i30 is about five per cent ahead of an Impreza on power to weight, and the Mazda3 is about 10 per cent ahead. So there’s that. It’s a small but real deficit.
But I put it to you that this criticism of Impreza’s performance is mainly a kind of cognitive dissonance on behalf of the reviewer. Impreza has a CVT. A continuously variable transmission. CVTs don’t sound or feel like conventional transmissions.
Click for an explanation of the significant differences between manuals, autos, dual-clutches and CVTs >>
CVT transmissions do not function (or feel) like conventional automatics
When you ask a CVT to perform on the highway, it holds the engine at the optimal revs for that performance - somewhere between peak power and peak torque, most probably, which would be north of 4000rpm in the Impreza.
The engine remains at those optimal revs, and the gearing changes as the speed increases. This is the exact opposite of all other transmissions. Revs increase as speed increases in all other transmissions. The engine gets louder.
We make the following mental bookmark: louder, higher-pitched revs = shit happens. And the reverse: no change in noise = shit not happening. And I’d suggest that this completely subjective determination is responsible for 90 per cent of the criticisms of Impreza’s highway and uphill performance.
It’s that, plus confirmation bias. If you start reviewing a car on the foundational belief that CVTs are crap, you have to upend your belief system if you discover the Impreza is actually a pretty good car - and for most people, upending a belief system is kind of a big deal.
We tend to hang onto our beliefs even if the facts don’t support them.
I’m not apologising for Subaru - the absolute performance against a stopwatch is likely to be five-ish per cent slower than an i30 or Mazda3.
You’ll get more grip in the wet, in ice and snow, on unsealed roads, as a result of the all-wheel drive. This is a direct benefit traded off against the additional mass of those drivetrain components.
Plus, you have to bear in mind that this is maximum possible performance - if you don’t drive at high revs with the throttle hard against the firewall … then you’re not exploiting maximum performance, and in that case they’re all going to do exactly the same job.
The other thing Subaru doesn’t do - because of its obsession with modularity and simplifying the logistic complexity of models ranges - is: It declines to offer you a more powerful drivetrain in the higher spec model grades of Impreza.
Perhaps the view internally is: We’ve got WRX and Levorg if you want that. Which I guess is fair enough.
However, on my world it’d be nice to see the 2.5-litre atmo engine (or the 1.6 turbo from Levorg) in the premium grades of Impreza, because that would, in my view, represent more of a level playing field against the likes of Mazda G25 Astina and i30 N-Line - at least to the point of going into battle with both arms free to sock ‘em one.
This would be a step into the middle ground between Impreza as it currently stands, and WRX, which is firmly in the performance enthusiast domain and too much for most conservative car buyers.
The criticisms of Impreza’s performance you read in reviews are mostly, overwhelmingly, bullshit. For drivers who (don’t spend their daily lives driving press vehicles) and want a car that’s capable and delivers more than adequate but less than gobsmacking performance, then Impreza is a great car.
Criticisms
Because there’s no such thing as the perfect car, there are criticisms, naturally.
AUTOMATIC ENGINE STOP/START
First and foremost among them: the automated engine stop-start feature which shuts the engine down automatically in traffic when you get to a red light, become stationary, then the engine automatically shuts down, allegedly to save fuel. But really it’s just so the carmaker can cook the books on the official fuel consumption tests.
This system does not really save you any money, appreciably, but it costs you a lot in refinement. The restart, in particular, is horrible. Still, to this day. It’s almost not production-ready in my view. The engine decides to restart when it feels a reduction in the brake-line pressure. What happens is, you start lifting off the brake when the lights goes green, or the traffic moves again and then the engine control computer says: ’Hey, time to restart’ - which is all fine and dandy. However, the restart is quite severe, and that means there’s a significant, inertial jolt forward or shudder through the car which is quite unrefined.
You can actually turn the stop/start system off. There’s button, and you just nudge it. A warning light comes up on the information display. It tells you you’ve turned it off, which is fine. The problem with that is, at least the way I experienced it, every time when you get back in the car to go driving, it’s active once again. So if you don’t like it, you have to turn it off every single time you drive the car.
Imagine if the lights in your house worked this way. I don’t think you’d be very happy. I just think that’s a minor inconvenience and an annoyance to the right or wrong sort of person. You just have to decide if you can live with it.
SPACE-SAVER SPARE TYRE
Subaru’s done a fantastic job building this vehicle with these additional features like EyeSight with adaptive cruise that make the vehicle fantastic for driving on the highway. You’ve got symmetrical AWD, which is awesome if you deal with questionable traction situations like dirt roads, wet roads, wet dirt roads, or ice and snow especially if you go skiing several times a year but don’t need/want nor can afford that big, over-the-top SUV everybody pressures you into buying.
So you get a flat tyre, you put on the space-saver and, let’s say, it’s the middle of the night, you're on the freeway and it’s raining. Worst-case scenario. You will be limited to 80km/h, and in my view that’s a bit dangerous with the traffic potentially closing on you from behind 30km/h faster than you're allowed to drive.
Space-saver spare tyres also do not grip the road as well as a conventional, full-sized spare tyre, so that symmetrical AWD system you’ve purposefully chosen is hampered. But to be fair to Subaru, a full-size spare would mean adding even more weight - which one could argue is worth it for the sake of maintaining full traction.
DRIVELINE REFINEMENT
Final criticism here is the driveline refinement itself. This is a negative feature of the CVT. In dithering situations in traffic, when the traffic’s speeding up, slowing down, you're on the gas, you're off the gas… at times, and it does not last for more than a few seconds, there’s a bit of to-ing and fro-ing longitudinally. It's a slight vibrational feedback in the transmission that is absolutely a product of the CVT and the way it operates. It’s not a deal breaker but it is not as refined as a conventional automatic transmission or a well-driven manual.
CVTs are all about fuel economy - so the benefit, compared with conventional auto, is lower fuel consumption. The trade-off is a slight reduction in refinement. But don’t be mistaken, Subaru, like some other brands, has tipped a lot of R&D into continual improvements on that front.
There’s no manual transmission available and I guess that’s only going to affect you if you want to teach a young kid to drive here in Australia. It’s CVT only so you either suck that up or buy something else, I guess. Frankly, though, the manual transmission is nearly dead - in commercial terms; hardly anyone wants to buy one.
Conclusion
Not having a manual is going to be a commercial challenge for Subaru because the manual transmission is often inserted into the range towards the bottom so that they can drive the entry-level price down. Subaru can’t do that and they are already a little bit hamstrung with the equipment level because Symmetrical AWD means there’s a viscous coupling in the centre as well as drive components to the rear that you don’t have to fund if you're a manufacturer of, say, a Hyundai i30 or a Mazda3.
Then, of course, there’s EyeSight in three of the four specification grades, which adds another $1500 or so to the manufacturing cost. So when you factor all of these things in, if you're looking at the price and you say to yourself, ‘Impreza’s a little bit more expensive than [whatever], I’d suggest you look at this stuff on an objective basis and say to yourself: ’It’s not just about the money, it’s what I’m getting in exchange for it. So if I’m getting a more conservatively sized ‘small’ car, AWD and adaptive cruise with EyeSight, maybe I should be paying a little bit more for those extremely useful features’.
Just to break this down and make it really simple, if you're in the market for a small car, Impreza is not perfect but absolutely up there. If I was you, what I would do, is put i30, Mazda3, Impreza and Kia Cerato on a short list and then go out and drive those ones at the price point you're thinking about spending. Compare them directly like that and write down a list of the features that are really important to you and see which one of those four cars ticks most of those boxes. If you haven’t driven adaptive cruise and sampled EyeSight, I strongly suggest you go and taste test those because they are a real plus.
More on Impreza at Subaru's website >> including the Subaru recommended drive-away pricing calculator >>
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