Tech Is Our Subaru Forester Hybrid’s Achilles’ Heel

What about the driver assistance systems?

Our Forester Hybrid has a lot of advanced driver aids, including adaptive cruise control, lane centering and a backup camera. Unfortunately, I found all three of these aids to be lacking to the point where I stopped using them altogether.  

The backup camera is quite grainy, making parking lots look like the settings of particularly low-budget found-footage movies. And the adaptive cruise control can’t seem to decide what speed it wants to go, constantly having to increase engine revs to speed up. That leaves lane centering, which tends to ping-pong the Forester within the lane and reminds me a lot of bowling with bumpers. Again, not in a good way. 

We’ll explore some of this SUV’s good graces as we continue with our yearlong road test. But for now, while the Forester is definitely better than it used to be, it still came in 9th place in our recent 10-car compact SUV comparison test, and tech is the big reason why. 

Photos by Keith Buglewicz