our new car
In 2023 and 2024, it became clear to us that the next few years will probably include more multi-hour road trips. Brooke’s father splits his time between Tucson, Arizona and Durango, Colorado. My mother was living in central Texas (though that has changed since then). And we were spending something like six weekends per summer either visiting family and friends or having weekend getaways in different parts of Colorado.
Our car at the time was the Subaru Impreza that Brooke bought new to replace her older Subaru Impreza. She called the car Pigletmobile, riffing on the nickname she and both use for her. That Impreza was a decent car for getting around town, but it just wasn’t very comfortable for road trips. It was noisier than I liked, and also had a bumpy ride even on the highway. The Impreza is Subaru’s entry level model, so that makes sense, I guess. Sometime in the summer of 2024 the discomfort pushed me over the line, and I decided I really wanted us to have something with a more comfortable ride. If we’re going to share a car, I needed something nicer. So I set about researching cars in a reasonable price range (as well as some unreasonable ones). Brooke really liked Subarus, obviously, since she bought three (I think) of them in a row. But I also considered some Volvos and others.
In the end, we narrowed the field down to the Subaru Outback. I test drove one or two of them, and compared the different Outback variants. In Colorado that car is super popular, and if you want a new one you have to work with the dealer to see what’s heading this way from the factory and then put a deposit on one before it has arrives. Otherwise, someone else will buy it before it even gets to the dealer.
What we ended up with was the top of the line Subaru. It’s an Outback Touring XT. The “Touring” part means it has a few luxury features meant for road trips - upgraded seats, leather upholstery, sunroof, heated steering wheel (which is great on cold mornings), and so on. It has about twice as much cargo space as the Impreza, and of course has the same AWD system. All the controls are in the same place as what we were used to. The “XT” part of the name means it’s got a turbocharged engine, which makes it ludicrously fast - way faster than anyone should be driving. I compared a few different colors, but in the end I liked the “graphite” which is the same color as the previous car. That was the end of October 2024, so we’ve had the car for 16 months or so. It’s not a new car, but it’s our newest car.
And here are some photos of the car in some of the best places it has taken me so far.
