2025 Subaru Forester First Drive Review: It’s Nice Now

There was a time—and this wasn't that long ago—that buying a Subaru meant making some sacrifices. In exchange for your symmetrical all-wheel-drive system, practicality, safety, and a friendly dog-loving image, you gave up things like sound deadening, an interior you actually wanted to spend time in, and reliability (Can somebody say «head gaskets?»). With the 2025 Subaru Forester, it's clear that Subaru is keen to put those days behind us.

In many ways, as is typical with Subaru, the underpinnings of the new Forester are basic and not unlike the rest of its lineup, barring the WRX and the BRZ. You get a 2.5-liter naturally aspirated flat-four engine producing 180 horsepower and 178 lb-ft of torque paired with an unremarkable and unobtrusive continuously variable transmission (CVT) that lets you select between eight «gears» in manual mode. This is hooked up to Subaru's symmetrical all-wheel-drive system to give it the «Go Anywhere» vibe that buyers expect.

With that drivetrain, you'd expect a pretty uninteresting experience behind the wheel, and you wouldn't be wrong. Still, while the experience isn't thrilling, it's also not a true detriment to the car. It's the kind of drivetrain that I'd want in a Forester: a torquey, uncomplicated mill just humming away under the hood, taking me where I need to go relatively efficiently (Subaru claims 25 mpg in the city, 32 on the highway, and 28 combined). 

Subaru also made numerous mechanical changes inside the engine, which it claims will make its boxer-four more reliable, which is good given Subaru's past troubles with things like head gaskets and piston ring lands. This engine also feels unstressed, which should also help.

Things get a lot more compelling once we get away from the drivetrain. For a long time, Subarus felt, for lack of a better word, cheap. They're still not expensive cars, but the folks from Shibuya City have gone out of their way to increase the Forester's overall refinement by leaps and bounds. This starts with a new-for-2025 chassis design that Subaru claims is three times more rigid. This lets the suspension control the car's movement with less of a flexible body to compensate for, which leads to a