Just when you thought Subaru hit rock bottom with the revived
Subaru Rex
—essentially, a re-badged Toyota Raize, they’ve just ditched a core technology they’ve been using for
50 years
: all-wheel drive.
For the Japanese market, Subaru has just released more details on the
all-new 2023 Crosstrek
and in a plot twist worthy of an M. Night Shyamalan movie, it doesn’t come standard with all-wheel drive. Instead, it comes with a more plebian front-wheel drive configuration.
Though Subaru has offered its Impreza with front-wheel drive for the Japanese market for quite some time (it goes back, at the very least, to the 2007 GH version), it was typically reserved for the base variants which are powered by small displacement (1.5 or 1.6-liter flat-4s) engines. With the 2023 Crosstrek, however, Subaru is offering front-wheel drive to both the base Touring and top-of-the-line Limited. And in both cases, they come with an electrified 2.0-liter flat-4.
According to Subaru, the decision to add a front-wheel drive variant to the Crosstrek is so that it could be “selected by a wider range of customers.”
Sadly, if these new kinds of customers are looking for something more fuel efficient, it’s worth noting that the front-wheel drive Crosstrek isn’t that much more frugal. Per Subaru, cutting the driven wheels from four to two (and also removing the associated hardware) results in an increase of just—drum roll, please—0.6 km/L (16.4 km/L versus 15.8 km/L).
Theoretically, the Crosstrek FWD should have a more affordable cost of ownership…so there’s a small win there.
Subaru has made a name for themselves with its all-wheel drive. They actually consider this a part of their core technology along with the horizontally-opposed engine. In fact, they’ve
moved more than 20 million vehicles equipped with all-wheel drive
.
Even when facing increased pressure to electrify its vehicles,
Subaru did commit to “improve its all-wheel drive system.”
Seems that improvement was to ditch the system altogether.
Keyword: Subaru Just Hit Rock Bottom With FWD 2023 Crosstrek