Subaru Levorg Review | Auto Expert John Cadogan | Australia

It’s a WRX wagon. Which means a Levorg is a practical five-seat - well, a practical four-seater with an impractical extra seat for someone you really hate, across the Nullabor - but it’s a practical family car that you can punt. Seriously punt. It’s friggin’ awesome.

The wagon bit is big enough to be really useful in that ‘landed gentry / breeder’ context. To verify this, for - literally - shits and giggles, I drove north on the freeway for about 45 minutes in the Levorg GT-S spec.B, recently. I picked up 12 - count ‘em - 12 bags of chook shit, for the garden, from one of the local boutique chook shit retailers.

If you want a traditional family SUV to feel like a valium enema on top of a Rohipnol milkshake - drive a Levorg first. They’re about the same price. And they’re about as practical - if you don’t need the SUV ground clearance. It’s a WRX wagon. Australian families buy SUVs because … SUVs. Keeping up with the Joneses. Whatever. If you want to overtake the Joneses, on the outside, in the wet, with a one-finger salute as you pass, buy a Levorg.

So, without getting bogged down in it - everything I said about WRX with a CVT pertains to Levorg. Performance: about the same. It’s the same powertrain, and there’s only 50 kilos in it - there’s only three per cent in power-to-weight. You’d never even feel it. Goes like a WRX. But there’s 45-series rubber on Levorg and 40 on WRX, and WRX also has one-inch wider wheels - but the same width tyres.

Levorg just feels crisp and composed. It does what you tell it to. It’s engaging. Its limits are way ahead of most drivers - lots of safety margin there. And it’s got EyeSight - Subaru’s brilliant safety system that gives you fatigue warning, lane departure warning, and adaptive cruise control. Really impressive … slightly annoying. That’s a reasonable tradeoff, if it saves your life one day. I highlighted some of what EyeSight can do in my robot cars report.

There’s two-and-a-half different flavours of Levorg. The GT. That’s the base model. Fabric seats, smaller touchscreen - but not poverty. Still gets a proximity key, a reversing camera, and 24 different buttons on the steering wheel. Twenty-four.

Anyway, it’s going to take you a while to become a maestro with that wheel, which is D-shaped. And the shape, frankly, is a fail. Good for a race car, but horrible on a road car where some hand repositioning is required. A triumph of marketing over function there, sadly.

The GT-S adds much of the stuff that Subaru calls ‘Premium’ elsewhere in the lineup: the bigger touchscreen, leather, a side camera assist system, rain-sensing wipers, plus Bilstein suspension bits. It’s about $6000 more for GT-S - a pretty good investment if you’ve got the cash, in my view.

GT-S spec.B is like GT-S plus nine STI upgrade bits that are all cosmetic. You get black 18-inch STI wheels - but it’s quite strange seeing STI wheels and no red STI calipers inside them. Anyway, STI body kit. Red STI starter button. STI reminder on the shifter - like that. It’s $4000 for spec.B - and I’m not totally sold that this is an easy spend to justify. But, hey, if it’s only money…