A Shiny White Upgrade
Laura’s beat up old 1990 Subaru Legacy finally got to the point where it was beyond servicing this weekend. Tuesday it started making an extremely heinous noise from the engine bay that was later identified as a bearing in the transmission failing. It only got worse as the week wore on.
Thankfully, the car shopping process had quasi been put into place already and the money was available for buying a new car. However, her parents were the ones who had to pick it out. Not myself, or even Laura who’d be owning the car for hopefully years to come. Nope, the parents who were 200 miles away.
Did I mention they have an unhealthy obsession with Subaru?
Suffice to say, Laura has a new-ish car (1997 Subaru Impreza Outback)1 that doesn’t quite meet all the things she was looking for. For one, she wanted a 2000 or newer. Also, cruise control that worked and finally one of the clicker-unluck thingies (don’t ask, thats what it was initially called).
Yea, we struck out on all three.However, the car runs, its got a new head unit installed that can interface with her Zune or play mp3 cds built in and in a few weeks she’ll have the clicker unlock thingy that’s also a remote start.
Notes:
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Yes, I know; Impreza and Outback are two seperate cars. However, both the cars manual, badging and everything else refers to this car under both designations. If I have one more wannabe mechanic or jumped up Circuit City fly boy correct me on it I’ll scream ↩
April 28th, 2008 at 11:52 am
I recently bought a Subaru, and the company has done no one any favors with its naming conventions.
It took me forever (well, not really . . . I managed) to figure out all the Impreza/Outback/Legacy configurations and make sense of the diferent offerings, especially because they have changed from year to year. So yeah, there’s an Outback, and there’s also a trim line of the Impreza that’s called Outback. It almost drove me around the bend and toward a different make of car altogether. (Fortunately, there is not an Impreza trim line on the Outback models. That probably would have tipped me right over the cliff.)
In a silly result of all this, what I bought was, as far as I can tell and the literature indicates, an “Outback Outback,” or the base trim line of what used to be a Legacy Outback, but isn’t any more, it’s just an Outback. . . .
I got to where I wished they just used numbers to differentiate the cars! 1 = smallest car model, 1a = base trim line, 1b = next trim level up, and so on.
April 28th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
Yup, its by far one of the most confusing naming conventions for a car line I’ve ever seen. Oh well, not much that can be done with it other than to live with it