2014 Forester: Seen in Saturday’s West Australian

Finally the Australian press has picked up the new Subaru Forester due to be released in Australia in February next year. There was a feature article in this weekend’s (1-2nd December) West Australian newspaper.

The article was by Steve Lague and I nearly wasn’t going to bother reading it. After all, I have read just about everything published anywhere on the Web that I could find. Every day I Google and Bing for any new news about the 2014 Forester. Every day. Never miss. What could I possibly not know?

But it was just as well I didn’t have too much to do while I was eating the chopped rock melon my thoughtful wife picked up for me from Woolworths because there were five interesting bits of information in Steve’s article that I had not come across anywhere else.

The first was that, going on how the article was written, Steve has actually test driven the new Forester—which is not that exciting in itself—but, he test drove it in Australia. This was the first time I had come across any reports of the the new Forester actually already being in Australia and being test driven here.

The next bit of information Steve provided that I had not seen before was that the towing rating of the 2014 Foresters have been uprated, with the petrol version being uprated by 50 percent from 1,000kg to 1,500 kg. This is sort of good news because the Forester has always been pretty average when it comes to towing anything hefty but this massive uprating, presuming it is ‘real’, means it could be used to tow a good sized pop-up camper trailer with relative ease. I suspect this comes about due to the hi-torque CVT transmission being stronger than the aging (really old, actually) Subaru 4 speed automatic it is replacing.

The third bit of new news is that for Australia there is going to be a diesel engine version of the 2014 Forester. The diesel version is only going to be available with the new six speed manual transmission. The towing rating of the diesel engine version has been uprated to 1,800 kg.

Fourth, Steve tells us that for the Australian market the turbo XT model will have a 2.5 litre engine and not the 2.0 litre engine used in the Japanese and American models. Now this sort of confuses me. Why would Subaru not release the 2.5 litre turbo into the US? The American’s love larger motors. I was wondering, maybe, if Steve has got this wrong. Nothing else anywhere even mentions that there might be a 2.5 litre option. So then one wonders, well I did anyway, that if there is going to be a 2.5 litre turbo then is it a twin-scroll turbo like the 2.0 litre turbo engine is? Will there be two XT models? One with the 2.0 litre twin-scroll and one with the 2.5 litre linear late-start turbo. But then why have two turbo models? This is very confusing. I will have to watch out for more about this.

Finally, for the first time I saw a firm date of release for the Australian market. Assuming Steve has this right, and he is quoting Nick Senior from Subaru so you would expect he has got it right, the 2014 Forester will hit the market in Australia on Friday the 1st of February.

It will be interesting to see if tomorrow’s Sunday Times carries anything on the new Forester. Often with new car releases an article turns up in the Saturday weekend paper and then the Sunday Times has an article about it as well. You can be sure I will blog it if there is something in tomorrow’s paper.