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2021 Pure Red Limited! Initial thoughts ...

40K views 180 replies 42 participants last post by  dbluefish 
#1 Ā·
So, my beloved 2013 Crosstrek had a high-speed encounter with a suicidal deer on a rural Montana highway a few days ago. It was pretty exciting -- the airbags deployed and everything, and my dog is probably going to need extensive canine psychotherapy. šŸ˜ I just had a few cuts from the airbag deployment, but the Crosstrek suffered far worse -- the left-front quarter of the car was pretty well caved in, and for a 7-year-old vehicle with 145,000 miles, the damage was way more than enough for my insurance carrier to total the thing.

Man, I loved that car.

Anyhow, it was time to start looking for a new vehicle ... and for me, there was no question that it would be a new Crosstrek. I'm still totally impressed with Subaru, and the model is a great fit for my lifestyle. (One of the salesmen I encountered tried to push me into a Forester, and I openly laughed at him. šŸ˜‰) I did a lot of looking, even driving one of the 6-speed manuals, but pretty quickly decided that getting a 2021 with the 2.5 engine was the only way to go. In a lot of ways, the specs of the new Sport model would have worked well for me, but man -- the yellow interior accents on those cars are hilariously and incredibly ugly. I sat in one for all of ten seconds and knew I could never look at that shade of yellow for a couple hundred thousand miles. So that narrowed my search down to the Limited.

Buying a new Subaru in Montana is a challenge, especially at the beginning of a model year, because most of the dealers are low-volume and the cars are always in demand. My local dealer in Bozeman has never been very impressive, and I can also now report that buyers should avoid Subaru of Missoula like the plague. So I started looking out of state, and ended up getting an easy, fair deal at Parker Subaru in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, of all places.

I strongly prefer that cars have some color to them, so I knew I wanted either the cool gray or the pure red, and in the end the red won out ... it's a great shade of red and is going to be a less-common Crosstrek color, and honestly, the cool gray is actually really just baby blue. (And besides, my sister just bought a cool gray one.) So here it is:

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I like the bright color quite a bit, though it does darken some in different light, especially when covered in road dust:

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Anyway, I put 450 miles on the thing in its first two days with me, mostly two-lane mountain driving along with some dirt roads, and my initial impressions are overwhelmingly positive. This car has advanced a lot since 2013!

-- The big thing is the 2.5 liter engine ... it really makes a difference. The car is markedly more responsive on mountain grades and when passing, especially with Sport mode engaged, and it's just a more satisfying driving experience all around. While I was never really unhappy with the 2.0, a few minutes with the 2.5 convinced me that this is the engine the Crosstrek deserved all along. Unless someone's budget is really tight, I would not recommend the 2.0 anymore.

-- Most of the EyeSight features work well, and the adaptive cruise control is excellent. The lane assist features are getting better, but still aren't quite there -- in my testing, the car nearly always recognized the highway centerline, but for some reason didn't do as well identifying the striping on the road shoulder. And the automatic lane centering feature is a little jerky and problematic ... when I first started driving the car, I thought I'd gotten one with a bad front end until I realized it was just the lane centering feature doing its thing.

-- I'm with the 99.9% of Americans who find auto start/stop to be a royal pain in the butt. By my rough calculations, every time the car auto stops it saves me roughly a penny's worth of fuel -- nowhere near close to worth it.

-- The Crosstrek's LED headlights are very good, and the steering responsive headlights are better than the gimmick I thought they were. And as someone who does a lot of rural driving, I am super-happy with the automatic high beams.

-- Others here are more focused on the Head Unit than I am, but I'll just say that I'm bummed that the car no longer recognizes my ancient iPod. I need to find a new way to get my insanely large MP3 collection in the car.

Anyhow, that's it for now. I'm sure I'll have more thoughts as I keep driving. If this car were Tangerine Orange, though, it would be pretty close to perfect.
 
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#13 Ā·
Happy to see that there are some other people here who are loving the pure red. šŸ˜‰



I'm pretty sure it's going to be the gadget that disables the Auto start/stop!

Thinking about a few small appearance mods, to start - window deflectors, footwell lighting. Better tires at some point, absolutely, and I'm halfway considering adding a lift kit by next summer. I love going off the highway, and I really beat the crap out of the underside of my old orange one.
 
#15 Ā·
What would a Subaru OEM dog look like? šŸ˜‰

Yeah, the so-called cold weather package should really include a heated steering wheel, maybe in place of that useless windshield wiper de-icer. I don't care what my lug nuts look like, though ...

The red looks very nice, I like it.

I went with the Magnetite Grey on my Outdoor model. What can I say, I love the gunmetal look. They even made the badging gunmetal, rather than "chrome" on mine.
Agreed on the gunmetal look! Really nice-looking wheels, especially.
Sorry to hear of the loss on your old one. Bad thing to happen. Glad you found a good replacement. Now you need to find some sort of sports mesh grill to replace the grill that Subaru just cannot get right.
I think the grilles on the '21s are better than a lot of the earlier Crosstreks, but yeah ... they're trying too hard to be cute with some of those designs. A plain black mesh grille would be perfect.
 
#12 Ā·
Sorry to hear of the loss on your old one. Bad thing to happen. Glad you found a good replacement. Now you need to find some sort of sports mesh grill to replace the grill that Subaru just cannot get right.
 
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#14 Ā·
If you have reverse auto braking - which I think you should because it's a Limited? - Here's the product I've seen suggested on my Forester forums:


I like the idea of the Crosstrek, but for me it wasn't practical - I needed the cargo space of the Forester or Outback. Will probably go back to Outback if I don't go to a tree-hugging EV first... !

Glad you're happy, and glad to hear the praise of the 2.5's - they got the tuning really good with the CVT on this one. My Forester is a heavier car and has plenty of zip in "S" mode...I use it on the highway all the time and keep it in "I" around town.
 
#16 Ā·
Yep, that's the gadget I was looking at. $100 is kind of ridiculous for something like that, but hey ... if it works.

And yeah, it's not just the increased power of the 2.5 -- it's that everything with the vehicle's movement feels markedly smoother.. The engine and the CVT are paired really well.

I'm guessing that in a few years we'll all have tree-hugging EVs!
 
#24 Ā·
I'll never be able to un-see that. šŸ˜®
If you're a little bit into DIY I just solved the auto stop/start problem on my 2020. I had to source a few parts (about $20). if you're comfortable tapping a couple wires I found a reliable solution. I'll be probably putting a youtube video together about it soon, but if interested PM me here and I can give you details.

Congrats on the new car! Looks great! I love the red!
Thanks! It will be a few weeks before I'm able to do anything, but I'd definitely be interested in seeing what you came up with. If you do a vid, be sure to post it in the forum ... and if not, I'll likely check in with you this fall.
 
#28 Ā·
Well...

 
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#44 Ā·
My last several cars have been silver or grey. My CGK still makes me smile when I walk into the garage. It is will never be lost in the sea of grey, white and silver cars on the road.

Same with my Pulse Red Kona, although I see more and more red cars on the road these days.
 
#46 Ā·
Yeah, I really like the CGK on the Crosstrek ... the color is set off really well by the cladding on the car. If my sister hadn't just bought a CGK Crosstrek, I might have gone for that color myself.
Yep, thinking back, it has been at least 20+ years since I bought a car that wasn't greyscale...
That's the saddest thing I've read all morning!
 
#58 Ā·
I shouldn't pick on the Forester so much ... they're fine vehicles, just not for me.

I actually liked the first couple generations of them a whole lot, before they started getting so ungainly. And in a way, the Crosstrek harkens back to those early generations of cool Foresters.
As the owner of a well maintained and upgraded 2006 Forester Premium I agree that the Crosstrek is the closest analog. I look forward to testing a '21, post COVID. From your description and others in this thread it may be the first one of the breed that I would actually favor.

Interesting how we choose paint colors. My experience with blue and red in Texas is "not good if not garaged." My last pickup was wine red and too big for the garage. Pretty while it lasted.

Mundane as it may sound, non-metallic white seemed to handle the sun better than any other color. I chose the steel grey of my Forester because it is basically the color of dirt, and for its first four years it drove through dirt every freaking day but only got washed once every two weeks.

My first Subie was a 1991 Legacy that I gave to my mother in 1994. It was Subie blue. It lived in NC under a carport and never faded until after my mother died in 2003. Then my sis kept it for my niece, and it did fade, but not terribly.

We used to think of red as "ticket magnet" in the muscle car days before 1973, but my innocuous copper Porsche was the worst ticket magnet I ever owned. In 1994 I bought my daughter in college a new red Legacy/Outback and it is still sort of in the family and running - her younger sister's former sister-in-law has it. Nearly 320000 miles. Dead red paint. But Montanan, I think picked for looks your red Trek is a winner. I hope you have a garage for it!
 
#59 Ā·
Definitely! I can think of a couple vehicles I had in the past where an encounter like that could have really injured me, at best.

And the extra horsepower is really nice to have ... more of a difference than I'd thought it would be.
Plug an SSD into your usb outlet. I'm using a 250G ssd with over 150 hours of music
Yep. I can't really complain about giving up my old iPod Classic, since SSD storage is so cheap nowadays.
 
#62 Ā·
Well bummer on the demise of your `13...

Congrats on your new purchase. I had a feeling you'd pull the trigger on the 2.5L when it came out. Sadly it was on a shortened timeline. But at least they were in stock!

No pictures of the carnage?

I'm sure your dog will acclimate quickly to the new ride...
 
#63 Ā·
Thanks! And funny thing ... I was just sitting here thinking, "Crap, I hope Chris doesn't read my Forester snark!" šŸ˜‰

And yeah, I would have been a lot more upset if this had happened a month earlier, because I would have needed to get a 2020, or bought a short-term junker car to hold me over until the 2021s made it out here.

Here's a pic of the carnage, and of the traumatized dog:

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