Yayyyy!! and then not.

Mine you could reach without a ladder. And from the next room.

You win.

A colleague back in 1999 got an Impreza STi (or similar) as his company car. He used to rally cars. It cost a fair bit, it was small and the plastic interior was horrible. I'm surprised he was allowed to choose it to be honest. It was quite fast at accelerating.

My sis has a 2002 Forester 2.5X in Oz. 250k kms on it, but it is pretty plasticky and shonky. I was most grateful that she allowed us to take her D5 XC70 on our road trip rather than the Foz, it would have drunk petrol for fun, and in any case we couldn't have fitted all our luggage in the boot and still been able to see out of the back window. It wouldn't have been a nice place to drive 2000 miles in. The XC70 is pretty old and done for itself (2007, 137k miles, it's a UK car which got shipped out there hence odometer in wrong units), but old Volvos are still pretty comfortable. I was surprised by its lack of grunt though, given the praise lavished on the D5, but maybe it was blunted by carrying 4 + full boot of luggage. Overall, my old E 320 CDI is a vastly superior vehicle in pretty much every regard. Biggest annoyance in the Volvo was the steeply sloping A pillar, both of us kept banging our heads getting in and out. And we're 5'10" and 5'6". Also annoying was the 12v outlets all being non-functional. I bought some new fuses in the first petrol station we stopped in, but they didn't do the trick, this was compounded by the missus leaving our travel power adapter in one of our motels, so we were struggling to keep the phone charged for satnav duties (and cope with demand from the children to charge their devices constantly). Had to get a "power bank" to use in the car and some USB adapters for overnight charging.

I reckon that Suzuki is the new Subaru! Sharply styles models, loads of 4WD choices, TC autoboxes, and better quality (looking) interiors!

Much better pricing too.

Quite fancy a go in the Swift Sport with the 1.4 turbo petrol engine, which is supposed to be a nice power plant. Although the larger Vitara might suit my aching bones a bit more.

In some respects, whilst CVT gearboxes are not designed for quick getaways, are you used to a turbocharged engine, which when mated to a regualr auto gearbox does deliver that oomph after a short period of skirt gathering...??

I once complained about the lack of power of a rental car with a reasonably sized petrol engine and was reminded that I was used to driving a Turbodiesel and therefore was expecting a nice slug of low down torque which was inherently missing from the car I was driving...