Cars

Subaru Outback review: the wagon that fits the valley

Two weeks, 900 miles, one canoe on the roof and a trunk full of farm share.

By Gil Brannigan · August 12, 2026

We had the Outback for two weeks in July and put 903 miles on it. Most of that was the ordinary valley loop: Northampton to Amherst on Route 9, two runs up I-91 to Greenfield, one longer haul to Brattleboro and back, and a lot of short trips to the farm share pickup in Hadley with the back seats down.

The short version is that this is the wagon that fits here. It has 8.7 inches of ground clearance, which is more than most pickup trucks had twenty years ago, and all-wheel drive on every single one Subaru builds, and it is still a wagon you can see out of. The dirt road to the trailhead is not a problem. Neither is a Big Y parking lot.

It is 191.3 inches long, though, and that is the one number people underestimate. A Main Street spot in Northampton takes a second try.

What it does on fuel

Our test car was the Premium trim with the 2.5-liter flat four and the continuously variable transmission, which is the combination most people around here buy. The window sticker says 26 city, 32 highway, 28 combined. We got 27.9 over the whole two weeks, hand-calculated at the pump rather than taken off the trip computer, which read about 1.4 mpg optimistic every single fill.

Broken out: 31.6 on the Greenfield runs at an indicated 68 miles an hour with the air conditioning on. 23.4 in town, which is a lot of stoplights on King Street. 21.6 with a 16-foot canoe on the roof, which cost us ten miles a gallon and made a low drone at any speed over 55. That is the canoe's fault more than the wagon's.

The tank is 18.5 gallons. Figure 520 miles of highway between stops, which is Northampton to Portland and part of the way home.

The roof, since that is why people buy these

The crossbars are built into the roof rails. You unlatch each one, swing it across, and lock it down, no tools and no separate parts to lose in a garage. It took about forty seconds the first time. Subaru rates them at 220 pounds moving and 700 pounds parked, so the canoe was never a question and neither is a tent up there.

The bars whistle when they are stowed in the rails, which nobody mentions. Ours did it in a narrow band around 63 miles an hour on I-91 and then stopped.

The part that sold us, which is the trunk

We measured it with a tape instead of trusting the spec sheet. Subaru claims 32.6 cubic feet behind the rear seats, and more usefully the load floor is 43 inches wide between the wheel arches and 35 inches deep. Liftover is 27.5 inches, low enough that a full farm share crate goes in without a knee under it.

Five of those crates fit on the floor with room for a paper bag between them. Drop the 60/40 seats, which fold with one pull on a lever in the cargo area and no headrest removal, and you get 75.6 cubic feet and a load floor 70 inches long. A five-foot-nine person sleeps in the back diagonally. We tried that in a driveway in Belchertown, so take it as a measurement rather than a recommendation.

The hatch opening is 42 inches at its narrowest, at the hinges. A dresser we borrowed from a friend on Pleasant Street, 40 inches wide, went in with an inch of daylight on each side.

Seats, and two hours on I-91

The driver's seat is good and the passenger seat is not. On the Premium the driver gets ten-way power with power lumbar, and after the Brattleboro round trip, about two hours ten minutes of driving in a day, nobody complained. The seat bottom is short for a tall driver, and our six-foot-two tester wanted another inch of thigh support by the end.

The passenger seat on this trim is manual, has no lumbar adjustment at all, and sits higher than the driver's seat. On the same drive the passenger got out stiff. On a $32,540 car that is a strange place to save money.

Back seat legroom is 39.5 inches, close to a full-size sedan, and two adults back there have nothing to complain about. Three is a negotiation because the center cushion is hard.

Road noise on I-91 measured 68 decibels at 70 miles an hour on the concrete north of Deerfield. The transmission is the louder problem. Climbing Route 116 toward Conway the engine sat at one droning note while the car gathered speed underneath it, and no amount of getting used to it made that sound good.

The screen is bad

Now the complaints. The Premium and everything above it get an 11.6-inch vertical touchscreen, and it takes 14 seconds from key-on before it is awake enough to do anything. We timed it repeatedly because we kept sitting in reverse waiting for it. The camera image is fine once it arrives.

Climate control lives in that screen. There are two physical temperature knobs at the bottom corners and a hard button for the front defroster, which is more than a lot of cars give you now, and everything else is a tap in a menu. Fan speed is a menu. The rear defroster is a menu. Setting either one while moving means looking away from the road for longer than we were comfortable with.

Phone mirroring dropped the connection four times in two weeks, always on rough pavement, which points at the cable and the port rather than the software. The USB port is under the lip of the dash where you cannot see it, and the cable route puts a loop right where a coffee cup wants to go.

Also the trip computer lies about fuel economy, as noted, and there is no way to make it stop.

Prices and what we would buy

Six trims. Base is about $30,300 and gives up the power seat, the roof crossbars and the big screen. Premium, our car, is $32,540 and adds all three. Onyx Edition is around $36,200 with a bigger tow rating and water-resistant upholstery that is genuinely useful if your dog swims. Limited is about $38,200 for leather. Wilderness is roughly $40,300 and buys another inch of clearance and all-terrain tires.

Cold Spring Motors in Northampton had three Premiums on the lot when we returned ours, all listed at sticker, which tells you how these sell around here.

Buy the Premium. Skip the leather. Put the $5,600 you saved toward winter tires on steel wheels, a set of rubber mats and a hitch, and accept that you will poke at a screen to turn on the rear defroster for as long as you own the wagon.