√2023 Subaru Outback Touring review
Want next-level value, space and comfort, but not a conventional SUV? You’ll love the new Subaru Outback Touring.
2023 Subaru Outback Touring
You’ve got to love the Subaru Outback.
Although it’s now technically classed as an SUV, the big old wagon remains exactly that – a big old wagon. Sure, it’s gotten bigger and taller over the years, but fundamentally the Subaru Outback has failed to pander to emerging trends or new ideas.
It hasn’t veered away from what made it great originally, and as a result continues to offer practical and ergonomic motoring for adventurous types and young families alike.
It might not impress your friends by being an SUV with pretend-coupe styling, but does the Subaru Outback instead do the more important task of making family life easier and more convenient?
Let’s find out.
How much does the Subaru Outback cost in Australia?
The 2023 Subaru Outback range starts from $42,690 before on-road costs.
Our test car is the Outback Touring model that sits squarely in the middle of a five-car line-up. It starts from $50,990 before on-road costs, or around $56,300 drive-away in NSW.
Standard features include fancy nappa leather seat trim, a nine-speaker Harman Kardon stereo, electric sunroof, and even a heated steering wheel. A choice of nine paint colours is free, and the only option is black and ivory coloured interior (at no extra cost) or a tan leather interior for $590, which our test car does not have.
Consider the Subaru Outback Touring the flagship model with all the fruit except a turbo motor. Our 2023 Subaru Outback Touring is powered by a 138kW/245Nm naturally aspirated flat-four engine.
You can have a 183kW/350Nm 2.4-litre turbocharged version of the same car, but it costs north of $60,000 drive-away. Consider how much performance is worth to you before making that decision.
| Key details | 2023 Subaru Outback Touring |
| Price | $50,990 plus on-road costs |
| Colour of test car | Ice Silver |
| Options | None |
| Price as tested | $50,990 plus on-road costs |
| Drive-away price | $56,309 (Sydney) |
| Rivals | Hyundai Santa Fe | Toyota Kluger | Mazda CX-9 |
How much space does the Subaru Outback have inside?
You feel comfortable right away once inside. The seats are soft and squishy, and the nappa leather trim is supple and inviting. Both the driver’s and passenger’s seats feature excellent electric lumbar adjustment and both are well bolstered to support your fat bits nicely.
The cabin’s perceived quality has improved significantly from the older generation car too, and for some is probably enough of a reason to upgrade their old car. The large centre screen looks high-end and modern, and the stitched dashboard adds a sense of craft and texture to an otherwise all-black affair.
Subaru still persists with using traditional dials, which naturally look a bit old-school compared to the rest of the modernity going on inside. Something that doesn’t date, however, and has become sort of hard to find in modern cars, is visibility.
Whereas a large number of medium-to-large SUVs have moved toward introducing swooping and stylish roof lines, it’s also come at a cost. Those products feature high door lines, small windows, and are generally harder to see out of.
Sure they look good, but cars like the Subaru Outback remind you how important visibility is. A simple test is trying to look down and out from the driver’s seat, as in the Outback you can easily see kerbs and other things that are quite close to the car and usually invisible in other vehicles. It gives the overall cabin an airy and light feel, too, due to tall windows and a high roof line.
Over in the second row, space is fantastic for both adults and kids. Starting with the little ones, I fitted two child seats to the second row. The first was a Britax Graphene convertible seat that suits from birth to four, and it fit great facing both forward and rearward. It also didn’t require the front seats to be moved forward either.
The other was an Infasecure Rally booster seat that’s for ‘big’ kids from around the age of three. It’s a taller-than-average child seat that has fouled on the roof lining of others in the same segment, but had no issues fitting into the Outback.
It’s excellent if you have offspring. If they’ve grown up into fully fledged adults or you prefer to actually have mates and a life and not be a parent, adults will fit nicely back here too.
The high seat base means ingress and egress are far from hard on the joints, and the overall space you’re presented with is excellent too. I’m around six-feet tall and behind my own driving position I had excellent amounts of foot, knee and leg room.
The seat itself is slightly contoured and supportive enough, and there are also two air vents, bottle holders, two USB charging ports(one USB-A and one USB-C), and a pair of cupholders in the fold-down armrest.
Boot space is good at 522L, although not the biggest in its class. The space is usable, however, with a large and wide boot aperture that easily gobbles up a set of clubs or four pieces of luggage for a family trip away.
Other nice touches include some hooks for storing things and buttons that fold down the second row of seats remotely. If you do, you get 1267L of space to play with. Lastly, under the boot floor sits a full-size spare wheel.
| 2023 Subaru Outback Touring | |
| Seats | Five |
| Boot volume | 522L seats up 1267L seats folded |
| Length | 4870mm |
| Width | 1875mm |
| Height | 1675mm |
| Wheelbase | 2745mm |
Does the Subaru Outback have Apple CarPlay and Android Auto?
The 2023 Subaru Outback features a great portrait-orientated 11.6-inch infotainment system with wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto connectivity. Aside from the one time when the wireless smartphone mirroring system required us to re-pair our phone before it worked, the system worked well otherwise.
The graphics are a little old-fashioned, as is the standard with conservative and slow-to-move Japanese car brands, but it’s not offensive or troublesome to use. What does move the system into the future, however, is how the brand has digitised the cabin’s-air conditioning controls and removed nearly all related buttons.
All that’s left as physical and tactile buttons are two temp dials and some demister functions, but at least it’s made the fan-speed controls massive, easy to tap, and always on the screen to adjust. Still, changing things like the flow of air and recirculation can be slightly fiddly.
One bonus for opting for an Outback Touring model is that you also get a nine-speaker Harman Kardon audio system. It sounds great too, with Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s fifth album sounding big, atmospheric and sometimes twangy like it does on a decent hi-fi system. The sombre vocals held the right place in the mix, and the synth is given space to breathe by a smart equaliser and clever sound filtering. It also reproduced the 2008 remaster of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid with utter gumption and bite.
It’s a great stereo to soak up the miles with.
Is the Subaru Outback a safe car?
The Subaru Outback was awarded a five-star safety rating by Australian crash test authority ANCAP, following testing in 2021.
It scored 88 per cent for adult occupant protection and 91 per cent for child occupant protection, so consider it the selfless choice for your family. It performed well in terms of vulnerable road user protection at 84 per cent and safety assist systems at 96 per cent.
If safety is a serious concern for you, the Subaru Outback is a great choice.
| 2023 Subaru Outback Touring | |
| ANCAP rating | Five stars (tested 2021) |
| Safety report | Link to ANCAP report |
What safety technology does the Subaru Outback have?
Subaru is known for being a safety-conscious brand, and the Subaru Outback aligns to that philosophy.
Standard safety kit includes forward and reverse automatic braking, blind-spot monitoring with rear cross-traffic alert, lane-change assist, side and front-view cameras, plus adaptive steering-linked headlights. Subaru’s driver monitoring system can issue warnings if the driver becomes distracted or drowsy, and in the Outback Touring can use facial recognition to recall seat and climate control settings.
It’s pretty well loaded with kit.
How much does the Subaru Outback cost to maintain?
The 2023 Subaru Outback is expected to be serviced every 12,500km or 12 months, whichever comes first.
The first three services cost $349.54, $598.97 and $351.14 respectively, or $1299.65 for the first three years. Years four and five cost $801.42 and $357.56 respectively, or $2458.63 in total. Compared to other brands – namely Toyota and Hyundai – the Subaru Outback is expensive to service and maintain.
An insurance quote for a 35-year-old male driver living in a metro suburb with a clean driving record came out to $1514 annually, or $138.33 monthly. Insurance estimates will vary based on your location, driving history, and personal circumstances.
Like its servicing costs, insurance is over the average considering the agreed value of the car.
| At a glance | 2023 Subaru Outback Touring |
| Warranty | Five years, unlimited km |
| Service intervals | 12 months or 12,500km |
| Servicing costs | $1299.65 (3 years) $2458.63 (5 years) |
Is the Subaru Outback fuel-efficient?
Subaru claims a combined fuel consumption of 7.2 litres per 100 kilometres.
On test we saw 10.2L/100km – ironically the same result my colleague achieved during his test of a similar car back in July 2021. It just proves that it’s more thirsty than the claim in the real world.
Fuel Consumption – brought to you by bp
| Fuel Useage | Fuel Stats |
| Fuel cons. (claimed) | 7.2L/100km |
| Fuel cons. (on test) | 10.2L/100km |
| Fuel type | 91-octane regular unleaded |
| Fuel tank size | 63L |
What is the Subaru Outback like to drive?
At low speed and in suburban areas, the ride quality is easily top of its class. Its suspension is refreshingly soft and calm, meaning road imperfections or poor surfaces are cruised over fuss-free.
It’s quite serene how comfortable the car is, in fact. If you currently own something older and maybe European, you’ll adore this newfound level of comfort.
It’s matched by low noise and vibration, too, as the Outback’s cabin remains quiet even when the road gets choppy. We also spent time cruising through the Southern Highlands district of NSW – a regional area with winding roads and plenty of agriculture.
Some roads here – especially the ones that flow onto Macquarie Pass – have been battered by the weather and poorly patched in the interim. On these roads in the wet, the Outback remained composed and comfortable to drive.
The car is soft, so it’s not the car you ever even consider pushing in this environment anyway. The permanent all-wheel-drive system is worth its weight in gold if you spend time in similar conditions, so make sure you consider that when you cross-shop it against others.
The 2.5-litre four-cylinder powertrain still sounds like a Subaru when it starts, and there’s no getting away from the flat-four’s unmistakable character. Although making do with meagre power figures on paper of 138kW/245Nm, it actually feels quite spritely to drive.
Some clever tech in the CVT makes it feel direct and responsive off the line, and around town there’s no shortage of power. If you want to pull off higher-speed overtakes on a country lane, however, the turbo version may be worth the extra spend.
It’s the only time where I felt I needed more power, and given where I live, that sort of driving manoeuvre sadly occurs every Saturday or Sunday between Mittagong and Berrima.
The auto is fantastic, so forget any nonsense about CVTs being ‘terrible’ to drive. It’s quiet, gets the most out of the engine clearly, and doesn’t do any of those bad things that a poorly calibrated dual-clutch transmission does.
It’s not the most engaging transmission, sure, but you can’t argue how well it gets the job done and how well it suits the overall soft and gentle character of the car anyway.
| Key details | 2023 Subaru Outback Touring |
| Engine | 2.5-litre naturally aspirated four-cylinder petrol |
| Power | 138kW @ 5800rpm |
| Torque | 245Nm @ 2400–4600rpm |
| Drive type | All-wheel drive |
| Transmission | CVT automatic |
| Power-to-weight ratio | 83.1kW/t |
| Weight (tare) | 1661kg |
| Spare tyre type | Full-size |
| Tow rating | 2000kg braked 750kg unbraked |
| Turning circle | 11.0m |
Should I buy a Subaru Outback Touring?
Aside from wanting more power – which I could have if I bought one – the Subaru Outback Touring would be a fantastic car to own.
It does all the right things for someone who wants to move five people of any size. That’s offering space and comfort, inherent safety and all-wheel drive, and a few nice things like nappa leather trim and a high-end stereo.
It’s been contentiously thirsty during testing with us, however, and the service prices are still too expensive. Aside from those two points, put it on your short list for your next family car.
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