this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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Cars - For Car Enthusiasts
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Subaru no longer offers a manual in anything except the WRX and BRZ. They nuked manuals in the Forester in 2019 and its been gone from the impreza since 2023.They've completely abandoned any semblance of building fun cars anymore. OP would need to buy fairly used (and nobody with a recent manual wants to give it up, so good fucking luck)
The CVT's don't have too many issues these days aside from being useless fucking garbage. The mega failures they had from their introduction in 2010 to about 2018 have largely been solved, and if you're an asshole you can usually force dealers to do the severe-service 60k trans fluid change so they'll last longer. (Lifetime fluid is a scam.)
Their bigger issue is the CVT is useless, less than useless in adverse weather conditions. For context, my parents have a 2018 Forester. The awd works fine to a point, but traction control system is so overzealous about trying to protect the fragile CVT that it will completely BAN you from putting power down to the ground if it detects wheel slip. I'm talking foot on the floor, but its gutless and the engine is doing nothing. You can't disable it fully, you can't spin tires to chew your way through a snowbank, you'll get a foot into a berm and then be completely dead in the water when my old stock forester would have crawled right over it with wheel spin for days. On flat gravel it's ok but oh man does it feel terrible and gutless on a slope or in any kind of snow, and I don't know that OP would have much fun with it in the northeast.
And it feels like actual ass to drive. It tries to fake shift like a normal automatic but with zero torque change. It'll move the car fine but you don't feel a thing in your butt dyno and it drives me nuts.
Subaru had cool stuff that was decent as long as you maintained it but that's long gone. I have zero love for them now.
Agreed. You can pry mine from my cold, dead flippers. And maybe not even then.
If I ever grenade my engine, rest assured I'm sticking an electric powerplant in this puppy and keeping it moving. Stick shift and all.
One thing I do know for sure is that the all wheel drive system between the CVT and manual models, at least for my Crosstrek, is very different. The CVT is front wheel drive until it detects wheel slip at which point it may deign to send some power to the rear wheels, but with significant caveats attached as you have noted. The manual is a full time split 50/50 between front and rear, with limited slip (IIRC an electronic one in the front?) differentials between the left and right sides. This makes mine great fun to scrabble around sideways everywhere in the snow with the traction control turned off. If you start losing it you can pretty much just point the front wheels about 50% of the way towards the direction you want to go, drop it into 2nd, and mash it and it'll claw itself back in that direction eventually.
I also have a set of mildly oversized studded snow tires for mine, just to be an asshole. With those you're basically unstoppable, although what with one thing and another climate-wise I haven't had much use for them in the last three winters or so.