Subaru Legacy Article From UK

[MSB]

Article in the UK Daily Telegraph, hope this doesn't give SUBE555 his first chance to moderate, but the bit about weight of a woman did make me chuckle Car culture: You say ru, we say prestige European (Filed: 13/03/2004) The Daily Telegraph To red-neck Americans, the Subaru Legacy is an ugly but trusty workhorse. To its more middle-class British market, says Stephen Bayley, it is an elegant and technically sophiticated smoothy Subj: Subaru Legacy 3·0Rn Sports Tourer From: [email]todd@unioncitymotors.com[/email] To: [email]guru@stephenbayley.com[/email] [i]hi my names todd and im married to karen and our kids BethAnn and glenn. we have two rus right now one i boughted in michigan and drove to manitoba and took it on the alaska highway twice where we nixed a bear. i change the oile every 3000. my other ru is a butt ugly but cool 92 wagon painted all camo with a homemade brushguard by the previous who didnt know coon shit how to weld and it broked off 4 wheeling. i rolled this off a logging road and its badly beaten but rebuilded the engine at 273,800 and it hauls my moms chrysler LeBaron and four axle trailer no problemo but i use synthetic lube not that natural crap. I hope I can join your club and send pictures of my cars. Soobs rule, man![/i] In the United States there is an extraordinarily lively Subaru sub-culture, although it seems to be at its very liveliest in Union City, Tennessee, and Fulton, Kentucky, rather than Westport, Connecticut, or East 62nd Street. Check the Subaru High-Mileage Club message board for a surreal journey into the American soul as revealed in its passionate relationship with this most characterful of Japanese cars. There is the guy who has done 600,000 miles with no spare parts, another who owns 11. It is like a revivalist meeting: correspondents compete for extreme confessionals. They admit to discreetly upping boost, to enhancing intercooler throughput, to customising suspension bushes. They describe famous feats: the Legacy that pulled a Peterbilt semi out of a ditch, the Legacy that regularly ferries the whole football team. There is a noteworthy conceptual dissonance between their Legacy experience and ours. If we were to ask the redneck rev-heads Todd and Karen to answer the Proust Questionnaire's "What is your dream of happiness?", they would likely say drinking Coors at a roadkill cookout with internet porn for company. Subaru UK's target customer is more, or let's just say "differently", evolved. Our Subaru Legacy customer is profoundly middle-class. He values its exceptional technical integrity and, at the same time, delights in its understatement. But this understatement is powerfully meaningful for adepts who can read the signs: the Legacy's elegantly efficient four-wheel-drive is seriously useful for real countryfolk. Most Audi quattro owners, even when threatened with confiscation of a Harvey Nichols chargecard, would not be certain they had bought a badge or a full-time connection of engine to wheels. Swill-churning farmers use Subarus. The latest Legacy wagon contests the market occupied by what the importer coyly calls "prestige Europeans" which I think may be a politically correct, if socially inaccurate, description of Germans. Hitherto Subaru Legacy styling, hell, all Subaru styling, was odd — and wilfully so, I often suspected. But past eccentricities have here been extirpated. The new car is more of a piece, designed by a single committee rather than by competing ones. Or, at least, designed by individuals who were on speaking terms. It is rounder, wider, smoother, butcher, more modern. Subaru's trademark horizontally-opposed engine allows a low nose and the Legacy has been made deliberately squat, in recognition that stance is one of the most powerful forms of non-verbal communication in the language of car design. Whether the result is more sophisticated or more bland is a matter of personal interpretation. The interior of the Legacy Sports Tourer does not quite achieve that ineffable rapport between visual co-ordination and physical quality that is an Audi trademark, but it is beautifully built (better so, I sense, than BMW or Mercedes) and, for a Japanese car, surprisingly elegant. Mine had leather the colour of a fashionable amuse-bouche of champignon cappuccino with grey mirror-finish wood to boot. The electro-luminiscent dials are what my daughter calls "way cool", the seats superb and the radio controls very fine. The Subaru thing is all about technical sophistication. The new Legacy achieves impressive performance improvements through attacks on friction and weight. That low nose means low drag. Bonnet and tailgate as well as complex rear suspension are aluminium-alloy. Camshafts are hollow. The latest Legacy Sports Tourer is about 55kg (8st 7oz) lighter than its predecessor, a figure that Subaru UK hilariously says is about the weight of an average woman. Of course, Subaru of America Inc. can make no such claim: after not a few Thick Shakes, Todd's Karen weighs more than 90kg (14st 17oz) in her Dacron socks. The three-litre, aluminium-alloy flat-six is a fabulous engine that allows exceptionally smooth progress through an automatic transmission that has a sequential mode. Subaru claims 245bhp, but it feels like less. In fact, the Sports Tourer feels notably slow: I sometimes wondered whether I was pressing a dead pedal, not an accelerator. Accurately lively and precise handling compensate. They say a revised exhaust system with reduced back pressure reduces burble, but this very same burble was always one of the most attractive Subaru features. This Subaru is a better car than its predecessor but not, perhaps, a more interesting one. Still, the type's fundamental characteristics are unchanged. One of my Kentucky correspondents tells me about his own car: "It's a bitt scrunched since I ran into a Mexican and the cops said you wanna tow and I said naw it's a ru and rus run for ever." [/i]

[SUBE555]

That's a pretty crude written article, but none-the-less news I gather. BTW, I've been working on some updating around here in case you missed some of it. :)

[ha-evolution]

It's definately not the most flattering article although it was somewhat humorous.