Generally highly satisfied but lots of little glitches.
While we love this vehicle when it works, we have been plagued by lots of little things.
1) Apple CarPlay integration has had lots of intermittent problems, mostly connecting. It seems to have gotten better since we purchased the vehicle so I suspect that they have been upgrading the software in the background but the lack of willingness to acknowledge the issue was and is a problem. They need to be more transparent and have online services for us to report the problem and monitor progress towards a solution. Then, if they do push a software upgrade that fixes (or attempts to fix) the issue, they need to send out a notification. What is the point of having an App tied to my VIN number if you aren’t going to be transparent about issues and allow two-way communications.
2) User Recognition - this is a very nice feature when it works and really annoying when it doesn’t (about 30-40%) of the time. And when it doesn’t work, there is no way to retrigger the facial recognition manually.
3) User Identity Management - I was very chagrined to learn that there are three (3) independent User Identity systems in the Touring model that we purchased (lower trim levels have less) and they are not integrated in any way. They often conflict with one another again making something that should be really cool, really annoying. There are 1) the two individual seat setting (but not mirrors) buttons, 2) the user identities that control the radio stations and other console activities and 3) the facial recognition system that also control seat settings (and mirrors) and driver alert systems. I understand that some models don’t have all of them but any that are on a vehicle need to be integrated and coordinated so as not to ruin the actual driver experience.
4) the automatic rear liftgate has no manual override should it get stuck for any reason. The only way to open it in the event of failure is to disconnect the battery (which also causes the car to forget any customized setting like radio stations, seat settings, etc). We found this out because it also turned out that there was an intermittent problem with the liftgate control module in our VIN which had to fail twice before they replaced it but one could see other circumstance like things such as clothing or little children’s fingers getting stuck in it (they claim that can’t happen but that is what they blamed the first failure on). This really seems like a potential safety problem which should concern Subaru.
5) Driver Alert System - still glitchy and annoying. Lots of false positives around “eyes on the road” and “driver alertness”. We understand that this is a relatively new and developing technology but we have had multiple instances where it became so wrong and annoying that we had to just turn it off.
All in all, it is clear that Subaru is being challenged to, like it or not, transition from a basic car company to a software company where as many of the problems are software in nature as are hardware in nature. On this side of the house they do have to step up their game. They have a long way to go and can learn from the best software companies about how to keep their users happy while they push continuous improvement into the software products.
Again, when things work as advertised, we love the vehicle. When they don’t “not so much”.
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