My wife is a surgical nurse at a new location for her. 40 miles one way from home, but almost all back roads with farm equipment and game animals as the only traffic.

She was driving a camry, but I felt that this backroad driving for the distance justified a new 4 wheel drive for the winter months. During the evaluation of the choices the Subaru forester just kept coming to the top. Nothing else made has the 4X4 system like a Subaru unless you go all the way up to Audi, and Porsche.

So we now have this really nice brand new 2017 forester with the X mode option. The X mode is quite impressive, I wish when I had my Jeep CJ5 in the 70's and 80's that it could have come with this technology!

It's not exactly an off road machine, but if there was once a gravel road it will travel it as well as anything. The 8.5" ground clearance is surprising when the vehicle looks so low! It would not be the primary use vehicle for our hunting and fishing, however it would be used for getting to and from the river launch sites for our raft trips. As well as random trips into the mountains at times.

Over all I have had some off road experience with the Subaru vehicles in South Africa with the Subaru diesel pickup trucks. Not an apples to apples comparison other then knowing how well made and tight the Subaru products are. The Diesel is not available in the USA, so there is no engine comparison. This Forester has the 2.5i boxer engine. The suspension and 4 wheel drive system should be nearly identical.

The interior of this Forester is quite nice and fancy to put it simply. The vehicles in Africa were simple and without anything fancy at all. No air-conditioning, no power windows etc. I can recall many times in difficult sandy conditions where the Subaru drove around a Toyota Hilux 4x4 stuck in the sand.

Astonishing to see this puny little Subaru scoot around a brilliantly engineered off road machine, like the Hilux. The Subaru cannot haul out game the size of a Kudu though!

www.huntingadventures.net
Are you living your life, or just paying bills until you die?
When you hit the pearly gates I want to be there just to see the massive pile of dead 5hit at your feet. ( John Peyton)