I am considering buying a 2003 subaru outback

OK4450
To answer your question about the Subaru being used for Motorsports, it is my wife’s daily driver and not abused in any way.

Thank you for the clarification Hans. I just wanted to weed out the possibility of sports use being the cause of those problems.

That being said, I do agree with you to a certain extent. Subarus are not total clunkers but they have had their fair share of chronic problems over the years, not the least of which is head gasket faults.
For what it’s worth I’ve owned 3 Subarus, worked for 3 Subaru dealers over the years, and am an ex-Subaru Master Tech and shop foreman. That has put me in the position of seeing firsthand the various complaints; some of which could be considered chronic.

Ok4450…as an ex Subaru Master Tech, are problems with the drive train chronic ?

The biggest problem I’ve seen in the driveline is failure of the automatic tranmissions. At one time there were some chronic problems with the synchronizers in the manual transmissions but that seems to have finally been ironed out. It can be difficult sometimes to sort out a factory flaw from an owner or environment induced problem so any complaint.

Lesser issues have been premature wear of the inner tie rods and split axle boots; often the right inner in regards to the latter.
The big fly in the ointment is the head gasket issue and that’s been around for decades. It would not surprise me one bit to see posts cropping up in a few years with a rash of HG complaints about 2010, 2011models, etc.

On average I think Subaru is a decent car, but not infallible, and far better than they used to be. Corporate Subaru leaves a lot to be desired though; a lot. :slight_smile:

Thank you for your reply. I guess my biggest concern was to address the continuous banter about the Subaru awd drive train and it’s suseptability to wear and failure if owners don’t buy 4 new tires all the time and rotate them fastidiously. That Subarus at least in your opinion have failures on par with others and in non drive train related areas, which by the way agrees with CU reliability reports, I hope this at least slows down the awd mechanism fear mongering of Subarus.

Speaking of CU, not that they are infallible, but this most recent automotive issue, Subaru was declared the best all round automotive manufacturer of their tested brands on the results of both performance and reliability of their most recent models. Considering they only make awd cars, they seemed to have at least gotten that aspect right. Toyota must feel that way too as they are engaged in a co venture with Subaru and Scion sports car model in rwd.