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Thread: A New Subaru

  1. #51
    Subaru Unimpreza SportWagon's Avatar
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    And that's presumably with a U.S.-spec model.

    (Your Fiesta?)

    Quote Originally Posted by Random View Post
    A few quick impressions after a whopping 30 miles of commute time:
    • The back window is tiny and the mirror is mounted too high on the windshield, leading to a slightly smaller view than totally necessary. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
    • The AC is strong. I usually kept the 328's auto climate control at 68--in the Fiesta, that was too cold for my drive home in 100+ temps. I had to bump it up to 72 and aim the vents away from me.
    • Took me a bunch of button pressing to figure out how to scroll up and down the Sirius channel list. The up/down buttons on the steering wheel only go through your presets; you have to use the back/forth buttons on the dash to go through the whole list.
    • You can bog the engine pretty good trying to drive it like a big displacement engine.
    • Pedal spacing is bad for heel-toe, just like the Focus. One solution is a spacer under the gas pedal pivot.


    Love the color.

    So, did they try to make up for your too small back window by installing a back-up camera?

    Wow. It's not far off 555 Blue.

    Ha ha. You have all-seasons and summer/autocross tires. I might end up getting winter tires for mine. Probably Michelin X-Ice. And then I'd think about maybe some five-spoke summer rims.
    Last edited by SportWagon; January 4th, 2017 at 02:52 PM.

  2. #52
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    So I don't actually recall driving in whiteout conditions ever before.

    I didn't cancel our usual Sunday trip to Fergus because not a lot of snow was forecast, and many weeks ago I'd driven in fresh snow conditions anyway. The days are getting longer now, and so it was daylight to dusk as we went there. It was amusing driving onto a snow-covered country road with no visible tire-tracks, but looking in my rear-view mirror and seeing the asphalt through my own fresh tire-tracks.

    On the way home I decided to take a more well-travelled route. It was dark by now. At Elora we ended up behind a pickup-truck which was a couple of cars behind something with its 4-ways going, which eventually we found out was an ordinary car. A chain of cars keeping about 4 to 8 lengths between them, going about 30mph, (usual speed approaching twice that, or sometimes more; posted limit 80km/hr), following one another's tail-lights for security.

    And occasionally the ghostly daemons of white-out would blow across the road. The snow must have got very pelletized that day, and whenever we got to an open-field part of the journey there was a chance of a white-out occuring. The truck's lights would warn me when he decided he had to stop to let the wind die down. There were one, possibly more, cars following me in a similar fashion too.

    At one point there looked to be a van in the ditch going the other way, and the pickup appeared to pull off into a nearby intersection to possibly go help. We had far enough to go home I was willing to leave that to others. It was then I could more clearly see the vehicle with the four-ways going, and tell it was just an ordinary car, not a salt-truck or anything.

    When we got to the traffic lights near West Montrose all the traffic in front and behind of me turned right, and I continued alone into Waterloo.

    So during the worst of times, I put my own four-ways on now. No-one ahead of me to hint at where the road was. One particularly nasty incident happened when I rode the ABS out for a while during a whiteout. Its rough shaking caused my wife to suggest she thought we were going into the ditch. In fact I believe if anything we were too far to our left. A couple of well-headlighted pickup trucks passed cautiously the other way, and then the white-out calmed down, and I started up, obviously not being in the right-hand ditch, and, as I say, probably too far left. I knew the twists well, and we got to Conestogo soon enough, and I didn't bother with the ancient road into town that night.

    Close to home I realized my side-mirror, though not my wife's, was entirely caked with snow. It wasn't too cold so I used the electric window opener and scrape the snow off with my bare fingers. Similarly, when we got home, my side of the car was entirely covered with caked-on snow, but my wife's wasn't. The wind appeared to be coming from the normal right-hand direction (west), but I think it swirled up and over my car and eddied on my side, resulting in the deposit of snow.

  3. #53
    Corvette Enthusiast Kchrpm's Avatar
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    That's horrifying. My only experience with white out conditions was during the day on one neighborhood street. Having to cover any large distances in that would have wrecked me. Bravo.
    Get that weak shit off my track

  4. #54
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    Obviously.

  5. #55
    Subaru Unimpreza SportWagon's Avatar
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    Yeah, I've got to get the normal fog lights soon. No amount of light will help much through a white-out though; there's literally an opaque curtain of snow. During some of the lesser extreme conditions, low beams glare back less than high beams.

    The distance was about 40km there and 40km back, by-the-way. Trip home took about an hour.

    And I meant to mention that the low-ground-clearance front and side panels do get a bit hung up on the snow, but weight and/or plough effect eventually overcomes it. And true ground clearance for important parts seems to be actually still reasonable.
    Last edited by SportWagon; February 16th, 2017 at 01:48 PM.

  6. #56
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    I dunno man, it works for the Swedes. Saab and Volvo both sold setups like that out of dealers for SDM cars. Low positions to get under snow when it gets ugly, high positions to get down the road when it clears up. Little factory 55w fog lights are about worthless IME.
    Last edited by thesameguy; February 16th, 2017 at 02:57 PM.

  7. #57
    Subaru Unimpreza SportWagon's Avatar
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    The fog lights will at least help light more of the side of the road in good weather at night.

  8. #58
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    Fog lights typically offer about 25' of forward coverage, or about 1/3rd of a second at 60mph or 1/2 of a second at 30. It's not even enough time to get your foot on the brake. Unless you're creeping along at 15mph, fog lights will only tell you what you're about to hit - they lack adequate projection to give even reaction time for normal-speed driving.



    This is PIAA's, so don't expect the same performance from factory parts, but it's a good illustration. For nighttime rural driving, a good flood driving light (what PIAA calls RPC) is money.

    Obviously it's your car/you do you, but IMHO I wouldn't invest a dollar in factory fogs - they are never very good even amongst fog lights and they are inappropriate for anything over 15mph - they don't help you and they just mess with other drivers.

  9. #59
    Member Member 21Kid's Avatar
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    It's not a Subaru without gigantic fog lights.

  10. #60
    Subaru Unimpreza SportWagon's Avatar
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    So I blame the non-simple dome light behaviour.

    I often put the dome-light on to help my wife find her keys, but last Sunday I forgot to turn it off.

    I claim I would have noticed the light being on with old-fashioned behaviour of turning off immediately when all doors are closed. But instead I'm sort of accustomed to seeing a light on in the car as I go into the house from the attached garage because after you close all the doors, the light dims for a minute or so before it goes out.

    Two-and-a-half days later (Wednesday morning) I try to put something in the cargo compartment, and the relay will not work to open the latch. And gradually I realize all the electric things are not working. Except I do notice the dim dome light, and then see that the switch is in the wrong position.

    So I called CAA and they came well within half-an-hour. Probably within 15 minutes. A guy by himself in a small van, not a tow-truck. But he was willing to push me in neutral partially out of the garage so he could get in front to boost it with a portable boosting device. And so then the problem was solved. Except there are no indicators of battery charge anywhere.

    I had an appointment to have my hair cut at 9:30am. We finished about 8:50am, and I left the car fast idling in the driveway until about 9:00am. And then drove off at about 9:05am and took a somewhat scenic route to the hair-cutting place, arriving just in time.

    Good thing I'd intended to drop into a diner for breakfast on the way; so I was able to skip that and be on time.

    The hairdresser told me though, that if I'm delayed again, I can just phone and see if she's busy, and often just delay such an appointment. This is the first time I've seen her since she switched out of her nearby place and began working out of her home, actually several years ago. She has a knack for trimming beards that the nearby place I'd been using in the interim doesn't really have.

    Can someone change the title of this thread to SportWagon's 2016 Impreza 5-door? Perhaps I could, but I can't see how.
    Last edited by SportWagon; January 15th, 2020 at 02:27 PM.

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