Gadgetory

the outgoing Subaru Impreza was a pretty good little car except for a couple little things ugly and thirsty not great traits in the very competitive compact car segment so let's take a run in this 2012 heavily revised Subaru Impreza 2.0 I Sport limited that's a mouthful check the tech and see if it can address the issues now the fact that we're in a sport limited trim level on this guy and they've got like 19,000 trim levels means we have a very limited selection of technology standard or optional this guy is uniquely without check boxes to add gear for example that's your head unit you cannot get the six inch LCD touchscreen guy which would also have navigation not available on this trim it's available on several others but not this Impreza you also have am/fm radio but you can't get HD radio in this car I mean can't get it at all you do have however a USB Jack which is very forward for thumb drives or iPods aux is down there as well and notice in addition to CD you've also got bluetooth streaming audio and Bluetooth hands-free is standard on this car as well audio system for the output is six speakers base then there's a bunch of Alucard stuff you can do you can option a 10 inch subwoofer for 500 bucks you can option a pair of additional tweeters for 120 if it's not brassy enough for you or you can upgrade the speaker's overall for 250 bucks it's an upgrade of 4 speakers I'm not sure what they do with the other two leave them crappy I guess what you can get on this guy and we do have it is the CVT gearbox there's no true cog based automatic just the CVT continuously variable it also comes with paddles on the wheel as is the fashion these days and as you can see you've got a gate down here for automatic mode or over here is a simulated manual where it pretends like it has gears we'll see how well it works on the road now under the hood on this 2012 Impreza is something small that is actually a big story this engine got smaller from the last generation down from two and a half liters to just two litres flat-four boxer engine it's a sube after all you're going to get 148 horsepower out of the sky 145 foot-pounds of torque not overwhelming numbers but they do get this car to 60 in about 8 seconds if you've got a manual that slides almost a second and a half slower with our CVT but the payoff is in the mpg 27 36 now on this car with the CVT the outgoing model is like 20 27 that's like a different world but let's see how it is on the road now CBTs are either real good or real slippery yeah this one is a big fan of Nissan's version this gearbox but this one tends to have pretty good stiction it doesn't give you that butterball feeling that a lot of them do so good points on that and again it makes a big difference in mpg you pick up like 2 mpg city and highway respectively by going with this transmission the car doesn't feel as slow as it looks on paper that's kind of the point of a car like this which is not a performance ride you're not going to go to the track with it so who cares how fast it really is as long as it feels sprightly and it does now part of the goodness of a boxer engine is that it lays real low center of gravity is down just above the axle line which gives the car a nice low center of gravity around the front about the steering and pointing wheels so the car handles rather nicely considering that it's got kind of humble origins about the only thing about this car I had a hard time living with day in and day out is this sound coming out of what I think is from the gearbox it sounds like a belt rubbing on something all the time not like it's broken but like it's going to make me insane and that's unfortunate because this cars otherwise fairly refined and well bolted together I think it's a CVT thing so I would have to drive the manual just to see if it was much more refined than quiet but I bet I'll end up going the CVT anyway because it's a better real world choice and this one seems to be well executed