Styling
Mildly facelifted in 2023 for the 2024MY, the Outback is a handsome thing. It can carry off bronzes and greens as assuredly as anything which is supposed to live deep in the countryside ought to, while visually speaking it's familiarly an Outback, continuing a line of cars that can trace their ancestry back 30 years in the UK (yep, 2025 is a big anniversary for the Subaru). All models sit on 18-inch wheels and have roof rails, but the grander you go with the specification, the classier the Outback looks as - in this Touring trim - it has dark grey alloys and bumper mouldings with silver highlights for the latter, as well as silver roof rails built in on top. Put it this way, to these eyes the Subaru Outback is far nicer to gaze upon than almost all equivalent SUVs would be. We're sure many of you feel the same way too.
Interior
The Outback might appear to be car-sized, but when you park it near non-offroad stuff, you soon realise how remarkably tall it is. This is a good thing, though, because when you sit in it, you feel like it was worthwhile purchasing a crossover estate in the first place, rather than getting the impression you're just in a regular, low-riding wagon. The driving position is good too, relative to the body of the car, preventing the sensation of 'perching' behind the steering wheel instead of being 'in' the Subaru.
The Outback also has a nice, clean, high-quality interior, complete with black Nappa leather upholstery as standard on this Touring model. Admittedly, in places you can still see that Subaru is not quite up with the prevailing market standards, so there's no digital instrument cluster, just regular analogue dials - although many will say these are easier to read at a glance and simply better than digi-packs anyway. But in other areas, the Japanese firm has attempted to move with the times, the main example of this being the 11.6-inch infotainment system (enabled with wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto)... because even Subaru has succumbed to the fad of 'let's put the climate controls on the touchscreen'. Oh well - most of the systems on the screen and within the Outback work perfectly fine, and an alluring spec 'win' of the Touring is a meaty 11-speaker Harman Kardon sound system fitted as standard.
Practicality
There's plenty of space in row two of the Outback and the boot's something of a whopper, measuring 561 litres seats up and a chunky 1,750 litres with the rear bench folded down. Thanks to its symmetrical all-wheel drive, the Subaru can comfortably take on even the worst of what the British weather can throw at it, while it'll also tow two tonnes of braked trailer if you need it to. Hard to think of many things automotive that are more practical than this, then.
Performance
Subaru, being as Subaru as possible, doesn't do things the conventional way. Having killed off the likes of the
WRX and BRZ, in favour of an entirely crossover or SUV line-up including oddities like the
Solterra, it's something of an outlier in the UK these days. In many respects, the Outback is about the most conventional thing it makes.
But even this isn't beyond the reach of Subaru's perversity. And that's because the Outback is fitted with a normally aspirated 2.5-litre petrol engine, in an age when hybridisation or turbocharging are commonplace in order to get the torque customers want, all balanced off with reasonable economy and running costs. The Outback, though, delivers modest outputs of 169hp and 252Nm from that large swept displacement, which - driving the wheels through the worst type of gearbox, a continuously variable transmission (CVT) known here as Lineartronic - in turn leads to some even more modest stats: namely, 0-62mph in a sluggardly 10.2 seconds, with concomitant eco-stats of 32.8mpg and nearly 200g/km of CO
2 emissions.
The weird thing is that Subaru
does have a hybrid drivetrain available to it, in the form of the e-Boxer powertrain fitted to the Crosstrek and
Forester models. And the even weirder thing is that, despite all this negativity and the fact the Outback's 2.5 plus CVT combination is hardly at the cutting edge of 2025 propulsion, you still end up liking this thing far more than you should; it's like the bizarre
Levorg of a few years back, all over again.
That 2.5 isn't particularly muscular, and you'll notice that most on motorways when you're doing 50mph and want to get back to 70 swiftly (requiring a bigger clog of the throttle than you'd need in anything with a turbo or hybrid gear), but the way it has been teamed to the surprisingly good Lineartronic (it's easily the best and least annoying CVT of the lot) makes for a charmingly easy-going vehicle. Unless you absolutely need to hare about the place at maximum revs, the Outback has more than enough performance to be getting on with, while mechanical refinement is pretty decent too.
Obviously, fuel economy isn't great, and we were hovering in the high 20s to the gallon during our week with the car, but if you were on motorways more often than not then 35mpg and more shouldn't be too difficult to achieve. So it's clear that the Outback's powertrain is not without flaws, but strangely you can't entirely dismiss it as an outmoded irrelevance these days either. The linear (that word again) way it delivers its power is reassuring, even if the Subaru doesn't have that much power to start with.
Ride & Handling
There's a monster 210mm of ground clearance on the Mk6 'BT' Outback, in case you're wondering, and that should give you an idea of where this car is designed to excel - the clue's in the model name, folks. But, of course, this being Britain, we have a significant dearth of baking deserts riddled with all manner of venomous nasties, so we didn't actually take the Subaru away from the tarmac during our time with the car.
And you're probably thinking it failed on metalled surfaces, aren't you? That it was too soft and ill-mannered to be considered acceptable? Well... no, in truth. Despite the seven stars badge on the bonnet and the advanced four-wheel-drive system, this is not a car built for handling. The body control of the Outback is actually pretty good, while the steering is better than expected as well, but it isn't a machine which is ever going to enjoy being hustled along a country lane while it's travelling right at the dynamic limit, nor will the driver delight in doing such a thing anyway. It's therefore better to revel in its sumptuous ride comfort and elevated levels of rolling refinement, although there is a little more tyre and wind noise here than is strictly necessary. Nevertheless, with the exception of really big imperfections in the road, which can send a loud thud through the Outback's superstructure, for the rest of the time the Subaru covers ground with a notable geniality and good grace. We like it, and we guess lots of owners will as well.
Value
As a Touring, the Subaru Outback kicks off at a fiver less than £44,000, which is not an insubstantial amount of money, any way you cut it. However, in mitigation, apart from a selection of upgrade colours from the standard Crystal White Pearl (all of which are £695 apiece), there are no options for the Touring whatsoever. Everything on it, and there is a
heck of a lot of standard specification, including many items that are expensive extras on most things available at this sort of price level, is standard fit.
Probably why, in 2024, the Outback was Subaru UK's best seller. The company put on a small amount of year-on-year growth (0.4 per cent) in the past 12 months, but that only saw 2,419 Subarus sold in the entire calendar year; a mark of how small a player this Japanese firm has become in recent times. That said, the Outback made up nearly a third of those 2024 sales, with 750 examples shifted. So the appetite for a wilderness-themed estate still appears to be there in the UK - perhaps a case of 'if you build it, they will come'. Even if you've only got a handful of dealerships in remote, out-of-the-way places, at that.
Verdict
There's no doubt that, in 2025, the Subaru Outback is something of a relic. It has an archaic plain-petrol drivetrain, it's a type of car that rivals like
Audi and
Volvo have long since stopped making, and at £43,995 it's not exactly the sort of conspicuous bargain that would make choosing it over a regulation SUV a no-brainer. But it's also a pleasant, lovely thing to drive and travel in, it should get you to wherever you want to go come wind, rain or shine and no matter what terrain (within reason) is presented to it, and its relative rarity makes it something refreshingly different to the norm. We, for one, are glad that cars like the Subaru Outback Touring can still exist in 2025.