We dragged the new Subaru WRX out to our Performance Car of the Year test, pitting it against Lamborghinis and Porsches and Corvettes. That's a tall task for any junior family car, and we applaud its heroic effort. But the arrival of any new WRX means we must engage in another time-honored tradition; We need some sort of hater's guide.
Welcome to the run-up to Performance Car of the Year 2023. This year we’ll be running breakout stories on each of our 10 contenders twice a week, every week until the full all-out comparison goes live the third week of January. Let's get into it.
The thing is, we must hate the WRX because it's the sole survivor of a once-flourishing niche. There's literally nothing else left to hate on in the WRX's class. Subaru has outlasted its every rival in producing this kind of deeply affordable rally replica for the road. When Subaru first started selling the WRX, you could still buy a brand-new Lancia Delta Integrale. The WRX outlasted the Celica GT-Four All Trac. The WRX outlasted the Nissan Pulsar GTi-R, and every Ford RS, and the Mitsubishi Evo. It wasn't always the best car in its class, but it's always in the conversation. And that makes it hate-able.
It's Ugly
This is the cheapest, easiest, and most classic takedown of the car, because the WRX has alway been ugly. On top of that, each new WRX has been uglier than the last. I know that I hated the Blobeye most of all, though now it looks somehow charmingly retro. I wish I had one to re-enact all of my Richard Burns Rally fantasies.
The newest WRX does make a hard case for itself, though, with enough plastic body cladding to make a Pontiac blush. My own coworker Travis Okulski called the WRX "a sedan crossover that can’t really claim to be a performance compact anymore." He called it a crossover. There isn't a worse insult in the Road & Track office.
Inside the WRX, I fear, it gets worse. It's not enough that all the materials feel bad, but there are just so many of them! There is so much interior in this car, a sea awash in drab black surfaces! The center stack of the dash bulges out towards you, making the car feel somehow cramped. And this car is not small!
It's Too Big
This is another eternal complaint about a new WRX. A lot of this is out of the WRX's hands. It's just a sporty version of the Impreza and the Impreza keeps getting larger, as all family cars do. Our initial taste of the WRX was about 174 inches long. This newest one is about 10 inches longer. It's over a foot longer than the original, too, if you count the first-gen WRX we never got in America. (We instead made do with the naturally-aspirated 2.5RS.)
It's Too Soft
As with its ballooning size, the WRX is also too heavy. A first-gen car weighed well under 3000 pounds, and the first model we got in the States just crested that mark. The newest WRX weighs 3400 lbs.
That figure tells only part of the story. You see, old WRXs were sharp and raw in character, and the new one feels leaden and dull.
Certainly the new car isn't as agricultural as, say, an old Audi Quattro, nor is it as athletic as an old WRX. To some degree, the new car does drive like the lowered crossover you might imagine.
The WRX is maybe less a car than it is a hit of mid-range torque with four wheels. It is grunty and strong. If anything, the new engine is the one part of the car that no hater can challenge. The WRX gets the 2.4-liter flat four out of the Ascent and XT models "nearly unchanged," as we have said before. You get 271 hp and 258 lb-ft of torque, and you get to use all of that, right there in the heart of the rev range, coming out of any corner. This boxer is beefy.
It's a Pain to Own
But it is still a boxer engine. That means it has its own peculiarities, to be worked on by specific mechanics at specific shops. Even though the boxer does not offer particularly great advantages in any specific performance area, other than a low center of gravity and good torque delivery, Subaru holds its grip on this engine layout.
Buying a WRX, like buying any Impreza, is like buying a Toyota Corolla that's worse to maintain. It will be more costly to live with and tedious to repair. Again, this is more an act of hating on the base Impreza than it is a WRX. But there isn't all that much to an Impreza beyond being a Corolla that doesn't get as good gas mileage thanks to all-wheel drive that, if we're being honest, almost nobody actually needs if they'd bothered to fit snow tires in the winter. The Impreza plays to Americans' laziest instincts, and it makes us pay for it at shops making payroll one head gasket repair at a time. Scratch that. Two head gasket repairs at a time.
Of course, there are only dedicated shops to service Subarus because Subaru keeps making cars like this, year after year, for us to complain about. You don't buy a WRX for the car as it sits today, because you know that in five or 10 years, Subaru will still be cranking out this kind of car. There still be a healthy aftermarket to support it in a decade, and whichever paint you wish to apply to the WRX canvas, it will be readily available.
To some degree, this is not a historical take. This is an ahistorical take. It diminishes the individual changes of the WRX year-over-year, generation-to-generation.
It is true, as the haters say, that the WRX is growing up. The newest car doesn't have the same tinniness of even a Hawkeye WRX from the mid-Aughts. You don't get the same impression that you are buying about five thousand dollars worth of car and 25 thousand dollars of engine, transmission, and differentials. We complain, ad nauseam, in the same way about BMWs. The older one was always simpler, better, and more driver-oriented.
Still, for all its flaws, for everything that's worth hating on the WRX, the car defiantly perseveres. I know my colleagues would say that it doesn't offer the most finely-tuned dynamic experience, but if you want the ultimate in AWD performance with the sharpest handling, that car has never been the WRX. The haters have this car wrong.
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Even in this new generation, the WRX's basic formula remains. You can get one of these cars with a turbo, with all-wheel drive, and with a manual, all at an affordable price. To a certain extent, that's all that matters.
Road & Track's Deputy Editor who once got a Dakar-winning race truck stuck in a sand dune, and rolled a Baja Bug off an icy New York road, and went flying off Mount Washington in a Nissan 240SX rally car, and...
