Subaru Outback: Is the 'new' turbo 2.4 engine really good enough?
Subaru’s new turbocharged Outback XT is finally here after two long years. The burning question now is whether it's an improvement or a disappointment. And is it any better than the old 3.6R?
Subaru Outback this is on the tip of many car-buying tongues at the moment, particularly about the new XT turbo model. When I say ‘new’, it’s two years old in the United States.
Finally there’s some engineering excitement in the Outback range, after five long years since they killed off the 3.6R boxer six-cylinder Outback in 2020.
But is the new 2.4 going to be better than the old 3.6, going of the early details released by Subaru Australia?
It all started with this cryptic question from Andy:
Subaru Outback - I was wondering, having watched your video on YouTube if the CVT is still a rubbish engine.
Or would you know if they fixed it up?
-Andy
Firstly, a CVT is not an engine, in case there's any doubt about that. It's a transmission type and CVTs do have a couple of features. And just in case you don’t know, CVTs use a belt and pulley system, not gears.
They're really good at saving money on fuel because they're highly fuel efficient. CVTs are, however, not that nice to drive, generally speaking, because they do tend to drone on a bit.
Admittedly, they have made advances with CVTs, but they still kind of just drone on a bit. They're not as exciting in the way that an epicyclic automatic can be exciting to drive with all of that revving up and changing up and falling back in the revs: repeat
DCTs have this wonderful shift quality when you're up it for the rent. CVTs, not so much.
CVT is typically not so good at towing, although they have fixed this somewhat in the new XT Outback, so there's that.
Here’s what happened with a recent Subaru CVT problem I received, and here’s how Subaru Australia resolved it by doing the right thing.
Now, I want to start here by putting Subaru in perspective for you if you're in the market for one, like an Outback XT or frankly any other Subaru.
Subaru started off in Australia as a really quirky sort of nothing-brand that only someone with dreadlocks and a nose piercing would buy to take his girlfriend out surfing. A sort-of hippie car, I guess.
But then, they kind of stuck to their guns, they were extremely passionate about a really tightly defined niche that just catapulted them into the top ten. That niche was rally bread passion, all-wheel drive and ‘flat’ boxer engines.
You wear Subaru, as a brand, generally. And lots of people still do, in a market increasingly indifferent to brands.
WRX is a stupendous performance car and this passion really leveraged them into the big time. I was infected by the virus; I've owned four of the bloody things from brand new: two WRXs, a Forester XT and an Outback 2.5i.
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Is Subaru getting back to its roots or steering a new course?
But there are plenty of people who are probably on their seventh or ninth Subaru or whatever.
These people don't shop, not comparatively anyway. They don't check out what Toyota’s offering or have a peek at what's Mitsubishi’s doing, and Hyundai maybe they've got something good.
Instead, they just turn up to the dealership and they go, ‘I’ll have another Forester, mate, just the new one I'm trading in.’ This rusted-on consumer base might be a good thing for Subaru, but as a commercial operation, you need more than just diehard loyalists. You need market retention.
But what I've noticed and this is just my personal observation of the brand right is that over the past 10 years two things one is a slight attenuation in quality control I don't think they're as reliable as they were i just don't and also I think the passion is suffering the death of a thousand bean counter cuts I really do and I'll give you a couple of examples of that I wrote them down
Dropping the WRX hatch in the previous Rex. What were they thinking?
Botching the Levorg. If there was a car that could just kick the biggest goal for Subaru, it was that vehicle. Just don't spell it grovel backwards and call it a WRX wagon, which I know they've essentially fixed with this new model.
They ditched the Forester XT. WTF? Come on. Such an iconic car with grassroots following among every 20-year-old itching to get off their probationary license so they could grow up to become a 40-year-old who could afford one.
Taking at least two years to get the 2.4-turbo Outback here. That engine was available in the United States from the get-go, so why did we miss out?
As I understand it, Subaru Australia because it’s actually and independent importer called Inchcape, they wanted that engine badly right from the start. But I don't think they carry quite as much leverage into Subaru HQ as a factory-owned distributorship.
I think it's much more a case of Subaru in Japan telling Inchcape what they're going to get and to just suck it up.
Two years to get that car here is too long. And no doubt they would blame COVID.
OLD VERSUS NEW
So, let's look at the current Outback Sport 2.5i and compare it to the Outback XT 2.4 turbo version, make an objective assessment about whether they've done enough.
The 2.4 XT is there to fill the niche that was formerly occupied by the 3.6R. This is the core question. There's no doubt that the 2.4T is better than the atmo 2.5 Outback in every measurable respect. But is it better than 3.6R? Let’s run the numbers.
The base 2.5i Outback makes 138 kilowatts at 5800 rpm. The 2.4T makes 183 kilowatts at 6000. This is a 33 per cent power increase at the peak, and you are definitely going to feel that overtaking a truck, especially loaded up on holidays.
When it comes to peak torque, this is where things get really interesting. If you go from a 2.5 atmo Outback to the 2.4 turbo, you're going to go from 245 newton meters up to 350 which is a 43 increase.
Now, the torque figure translates directly to mid-range power, but not only that, the spread for the peak torque for the atmo 2.5 engine is from 3400 to 4600 but the 2.4 turbo engine is from 2000 revs up to 4800. So this is just a wall of torque from 2000 to 4800 and then up to the red line where it's honking.
This is what turbo engines are really good at. Atmo engines get better in a straight line, as the revs increase, but turbo engines go and they just keep pushing; they're just awesome in the mid-range and that is exactly what this engine does.
Of course when you're not pushing hard, it's going to be reasonably fuel efficient, so that's also nice.
When you look at the power-to-weight ratio, there's a big jump from the atmo engine at 85 watts per kilo to 108 for the turbo engine. That's huge. It's a 27 percent increase and but it’s not only has the power increased, the weight is also greater. The 2.4 turbo engined XT model is heavier by about 53 kilos. But importantly, it's gonna go about a third better in a straight line flat-out overtaking a truck with limited time or space.
You've been in that situation and if you're in it again you'd want to be in the turbo Outback.
What is perhaps not quite so clear-cut here is whether the 2.4 turbo engine is enough of a step forward from the 3.6R, because if you're looking at the specs and trying to decide - maybe you've got a 3.6R which you’re considering trading in with the 2.4 turbo XT. You wanna know if you’re going to be happy with it.
It's not as powerful, the 2.4. It's lost about 8 kilowatts over the same amount of revs. The 3.6R was rated at 191 when it rolled off the production line. The 2.4 has 183. So at the outset, that seems bad, because the 3.6R you might own currently was also about 30-ish kilos lighter and a little bit more powerful.
The peak torque is the same, it's 350 newton meters.
But here's the difference. Your 3.6R has peak torque available at one point in the rev range - 4400 rpm, which is pretty high. So that engine needed a real rev to perform. It wasn't that much of a step up from the 2.5i, as I remember driving those two vehicles.
Now, with the new engine, that peak torque which is numerically the same of 350, it is available from 2000 to 4800 revs.
So basically, that 350 newton meters is applied all the way from 2000 to 4800 with this new engine and that is means in the normal driving conditions this vehicle is going to operate in, youre going to find it performs substantially better everywhere it matters. Both engines at wide open throttle are
going to perform the same, but between 2000 and 4000 the 2.4 T is going to walk all over the 3.6R. In a proper drag race, with your AWD soft-roading family SUVs, the Outback 3.6R would be in front, hypothetically.
In that respect the 2.4 T is a much better engine; it's going to feel more effortless at normal driving revs, but when you're ringing its neck, the old one would really have gone just a little bit better - providing it still has all its original kilowatts.
The other big advantage is that if you've got the 3.6R which was rated only to tow 1800 kilograms, but the new 2.4 is rated to tow 2400kg and they haven't fudged it either. The 3.6R came with a 180 kilo towball download limit - the 2.4 tonne limit on the 2.4 comes with a 240 kilogram towball download limit - that's according to data on Redbook.
This is a step up from the 2.5i which is 2000 kilograms and 200 kilograms of towball download.
What this means is they have really beefed that 2.4 driveline in some way, because that is a substantial increase in towing capability and they must have tweaked the transmission because CVTs are notoriously bad at towing and 2.4 tonnes is a serious thing to be dragging behind a vehicle which weighs 1703 kilos dead empty.
Just a word of warning: I would probably limit myself to towing just 2000 kilos with a vehicle of that nature. But that is the manufacturer's limit, which just gives you a great margin of safety.
Overall, I'd suggest that this towing improvement is evidence that substantial work has been done in the background to beef-up that driveline and I don't believe there's anything wrong with Subaru's CVTs.
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