Subaru release online brochure for 2014 Forester

For anyone excited about or interested in the soon-to-be-released 2014 Forester, Subaru have released a nine screen online brochure. Click the following picture to open the brochure in your browser. The brochure takes 10 seconds or so to load up when you first click on it.

As you can see it is really formatted for wide screen viewing, but it can be viewed on a ‘square’ 4:3 screen without problems. Click on the arrows at the side to turn the pages.

Also the brochure is obviously mainly for American consumption because it is the left hand drive version of the car featured in the pictures.

If you have missed previous posts of mine on the 2014 Forester then it is due for release across Australia on the 1st of February.

Anyone who signed up with Subaru for a test drive as soon as it was available (I provided that link in a previous posting) should have been contacted by their local Subaru dealer by now. I have. They wanted to know which model I was interested in test driving so they could schedule in all the requests they have had. But at this stage I have not heard back as to when exactly that will be.

What we do find out in the brochure that I have not been able to find out anywhere else is the economy of the 2.0 litre twin-scroll turbo in the XT version of the new Forester.

As you can see from the following snippet from the brochure, indicated by my hand drawn red arrow, the XT turbo gets 27 mpg highway.

Now this is where it gets tricky. This brochure is for the American market. So the gallons referred to here are almost certainly American gallons, which are smaller than Australian gallons. An American gallon contains 3.8 litres whereas an Australian gallon contains 4.56 litres.

Hmmmmm. Tricky this.

So, assuming that the 27 mpg referenced is based on American gallons then that is going to work out to 8.71 litres/100 klms.

If it were using regular gallons as used by the rest of the world then it would work out to 10.46 litres/100 klm.

I am pretty confident that the former is the right assumption and that the highway mileage for the 2.0 litre turbo is 8.71 litres/100 klm, or for those that prefer mpg that would be 32.43 mpg.

But, as impressive as this is, look at the economy of the 2.5 litre non-turbo. It gets 32 mpg US. That works out to 7.35 litres/100 klms or, in regular gallons, 38.4 mpg!! Pretty amazing for an all wheel drive SUV.

The other thing we learn from this brochure is that there appears to be a new red coloured Forester called “Venetian Red Pearl” (see page 7 of the brochure). We also find out the that blue coloured Forester that has been featured in almost all other pictures we have seen is called “Marine Blue Pearl”. I wonder if all the new colours, assuming there are others, also end in ‘Pearl’?

If anyone else has found more about the 2014 Forester somewhere on the Web then let me know by e-mail or in a comment so I can do a post about it.

Now if I could just win the lotto.