…but despite the horrific fuel economy and mounting list of things that should be fixed I may never sell it.

My wife asked me to buy some chairs the the local supermarket had out front on Friday morning. Took a detour. Road turned into a trail.

Trail eventually turned into something only a side by side or dirt bike could get through so I turned around.

Things got a little hairy and I was honestly worried I was gonna roll the thing once or twice. I’ve finally come around to hill descent control. It’s a life saver once you learn how to set it and to trust it.

Eventually I did find the store. Chairs are pretty nice. Got an umbrella while I was at it as well.

Having a truck is nice.

tech.kinja.com and product.kinja.com also now 404. I guess they just nuked everything *.kinja.com.

Sorry Oppo, but I no longer have a manual in my fleet. I traded in my 2014 Forester for a big crossover with a CVT on Friday. At least I still have something with a 6.2L V8 to take off some of the sting.

The Forester was a good car. It was starting to have a long list of minor issues recently, but I think it will be a great vehicle for its next owner. The dealer must think so too, because rather than taking it to auction, they already have it listed for sale on their website.

One last photo as we left the dealership. Definitely felt some sadness.

Anyway... here is our brand new 2022 Subaru Ascent Onyx Edition!

Basically it is an Outback that is having an allergic reaction to a bee sting. It's a chonker.

Subaru calls the color "Autumn Green Metallic" and we quite like it. I think it works really well in this "Onyx Edition" trim with black wheels and blacked out accents. In fact, my wife liked it so much that we drove two hours to a dealer in Albuquerque when she found out that they had one in stock, rather than settling for a different color/trim at nearby Subaru of Santa Fe.

The Onyx Edition trim is new to the Ascent for 2022 after first appearing on the Outback XT starting in 2022. The idea is the same on the Ascent: Black wheels/accents, unique black and gray water/scratch/stain-resistant seats, and feature content somewhere between the Premium and Limited trims putting it right in the middle of the 5 available Ascent trims (Base, Premium, Onyx, Limited, Touring). The star of the show and what really pushed us to this model is those seats. They feel durable without being hard and stiff. We have two grade/middle-school kids and two medium dogs so this is right up our alley.

We got the bigly sunroof option. I think it is the only way Subaru is building them right now unless you put in an order. If we were ordering, we probably would've skipped it, but I do kinda love it.

The interior is pretty well packaged. The second row chairs slide, and if you pull them forward a bit, the back seat is actually somewhat habitable. My wife fits back there just fine at 5'6", but at 6'1" it is pretty tight for me unless the middle-row seats are slid up to the point the those passengers have almost no legroom.

Unless, of course, you take the middle seat of the third row with pretty much infinite legroom...

Getting to the back is pretty easy as well. I think probably the previous-generation Nissan Pathfinder started the "getting the second row seat out of the way shouldn't be hard" trend and pretty much everyone has copied it now.

Regardless, the back row will pretty much be dogs most of the time. Or just be folded down for cargo. We've gotten to the point as a family that our Outback is tight for road trips. We make a 7-8 hour trek to the Phoenix area to see my wife's parents several times a year, and our typical cargo pretty much stuffs the Outback's cargo hold floor-to-ceiling. This should be a much more reasonable cruiser. There isn't a ton of space behind the third row with the seats up, but we went to the grocery store for the week today and it all fit back there fine. This is the first time I've had a power hatch and I love it.

Rear climate control and USB ports will also be great to have when shuttling the kids all over the Southwest. (Nothing is a short drive when you live in the middle of nowhere in Northern New Mexico.)

The vehicle had 2 miles on it when we got in for the test drive. We're up to a little over 200 now. Still on the first tank of gas. Overall a nice, practical vehicle and - by far - the nicest one that we've ever owned. It's still sinking in that is isn't a service loaner!

Some assorted random thoughts:

• Our main motivation for the purchase is that our Outback is really starting to guzzle oil to the tune of a quart every 500 miles or so. That has made it something of a pain for the 1100 mile round trip to my in-laws. It also has 117,000 miles and a lot of other minor issues that were making me a little bit nervous about taking it on long trips.
• So why not trade in the Outback? Well, it had a pretty rough encounter with a deer about 4 years ago. It still has a clean title, but the insurance claim tanked its value. The Forester was simply worth a lot more.
• On that note, I bought the Forester for $16,500 in March 2015 with 30,000 miles on it, and traded it in January 2022 with 97,000 miles for $11,000. I didn't think it would be worth more than $7,000 until my wife convinced my to type the VIN into Vroom right before Christmas. When I saw that, I decided sure let's trade it. (Also the registration expired at the end of December so one less renewal there.) These crazy used car prices are take some of the sting off of the crazy new car prices if you can afford it.
• So I guess my new daily drive is a 2013 Outback 2.5i Premium with a CVT and 117,000 miles that drinks tons of oil. Boring, but it will do just fine for driving to and from work. Plus it has so many dings/scrapes/dents that I don't have to give a crap where I park it.
• Having a car payment for the first time in 3 years hurts. We were able to get 2.3% financing which seems pretty acceptable with the current pace of inflation. It is a 60 month term. They offered 72, which I know is more and more common, but just seems nuts to me for a car.
• We put $10k down. With that and the trade, the payments are pretty reasonable. I didn't plan ahead for the down payment, because I didn't know how the deal would go. So once we signed everything I had to go find a cashier's check. With Omicron surging that proved difficult. Closest branch of our bank was closed. Next one, lobby was as closed and we waited half an hour in the drive through only to be told they couldn't do a cashier's check at the window. Third one was open thank goodness, because it was getting close to closing time.
• Fiesta Subaru in Albuquerque was awesome. About as painless as buying a new car could be. Highly recommend.
• The Ascent feels smaller on the road than I expected. Obviously no sports car, but it actually drives lighter than the Outback and really doesn't feel any different than the Forester except I keep checking how wide it is.
• The turbo motor is a revelation. Deals with the mountains here with ease. Not "fast" and sounds grumpy, but plenty of punch. The Forester and Outback can't keep up with traffic going uphill here. The Ascent is perfectly fine.
• There does seem to be some noticeable turbo lag, but it might also be the CVT trying to downshift as well. The CVT has a manual mode that simulates 8 ratios. When I get a chance I'll put it into that to see what's really going on. Again, it's so much faster than our NA 4-cylinder Subarus up here at 7,300 feet that I don't mind much, but I still want to get to the bottom of it.
• I know enthusiasts like to crap on a lot of the modern safety tech, but most of it works really well in this car. The lane departure warning is a little frustrating but can easily be turned off. The rest of it is pretty great.
• CarPlay is making me want to put an aftermarket system that has it into my Raptor.
• That sunroof.
• The 20" wheels look great (in my opinion anyway), but you can feel them. Honestly, the 18" in the lower trims probably rides better.
• Did we consider anything else? Besides an Outback XT, not seriously, no. My wife is a Subaru die-hard after nailing that deer at 70 MPH in the Outback. Safety is pretty high on our priority list in the family hauler and we really trust Subaru on that front.
• Speaking of which, the headlights in this car are amazing. Not only do they steer with the wheel, but even straight ahead they do a much better job lighting the way than anything else I've ever owned. Also auto-dim high beams are awesome.
• I know the Ascent is getting a little bit long into its production cycle and gets lost in the 3-row competition, but I think it is a pretty good deal overall. Trim-for-trim the competition starts lower on paper, but when you add AWD that is standard on the Subaru and optional on basically everything else it is right in line.

If anyone is curious, here is our window sticker:

I know that I haven't been around Oppo much recently, but I'll try to be here to answer questions if anyone has any and just in general be here more often. I plan to post an update review at some point when I've had more seat time. This will be my wife's primary vehicle, though, so that might be a few months.

Hope all is well Oppo! Feel free to also leave life updates here, since it's been a hot minute since I've talked to a lot of you.

5 doors down from Challenger Hellcat guy, neighbor has escalated with a GT500.

Bought used at Carmax interestingly. Not sure if I’m more surprised Carmax ended up with a GT500 they didn’t take right to auction or that someone walked into Carmax of all places to buy a 760 HP sports car, but here we are. Anyway, he’s been driving it up and down the block past Hellcat house for 3 days now.

Doggo for your time.

Great car/plate combo I saw grabbing tacos this morning.

I'm making slow progress. This is my first attempt at doing something like this and I'm learning as I go. A real search is still a longs ways off, but I've come up with a new way to organize things rather than the flat feed so that it will hopefully be a little easier to find things you want in there. I decided to break things up into months and years. So far I have 2017 uploaded as a test case. The links at the top take you to each month and the posts are displayed in a sortable table.

By default it sorts by the post ID. These were assigned when the post was started so scheduled posts and updates/reposts can end up with lower numbers than other things that were posted before them. Clicking the columns titles will sort if you want to see what had the most likes or you want to group by author, look for a specific date or whatever. These are big tables - there were on average 3700 posts per month - so they might take a second to sort. The sort is a script I grabbed off of the web and not perfect either. It puts ABC before abc for instance. But it is still useful - look I tracked down the very first of Urambo Tauro's My Favorite of JRiTS posts of the week post!

And here we can start to see what I still need to sort out. Embeds don't work yet and show an error. There is no formatting of the text in the posts. Comments don't show who replied to who so they can appear out-of-order. I also only pulled the first 100 comments for each post (technical reasons make it more work to do more - it is possible and we might get to it before the blog is completely deleted but only a few posts hit more than 100 comments so it is a low priority for me).
I plan to fix this stuff but it will take some time.

Here is where to check it out: http://jimisaherb.com/uploader/tablebeta_2017_1.html

Warning: All images arer currently still hosted on Kinja! I have no idea if they will be deleted soon. If you are using this archive to find and save your old posts that you didn't get a chance to before G/O 404'd then us I recommend using the Save Page WE plug-in for Chrome that embeds full images into the files that it saves.

Went for a little drive this afternoon. Better now?

Some old outdoor sling chairs with torn fabric to the dump.

A wheelbarrow and some soil I bought at the local hardware store.

My mountain bike.

A patio swing some friends gave us because they weren’t using it.

A bunch of old railroad ties that we pulled out of the yard that will be going to the dump later this week.

Despite its primary purpose being to drive down trails very fast, the Raptor has so far also been very useful for everyday truck things.

Going all the way back to 2017! I'm using the data that I've been pulling out of Kinja for the last 36 hours since the big 404 and trying to write a script to format it into something resembling a post. It is just starting to. Comments have a long way to go still. First I need to get the errors sorted out then I need attack organizing them by who was being replied to which is going to take a lot more work.

Right now images are still being pulled from Kinja - this isn't a full archive and it will start to bomb out if Kinja starts deleting our content off of the server.

Hopefully we can use this to resurrect some posts for those folks that didn't have time to save their content before the shutdown (and wanted to).

Update: Starting to get the bugs worked out and planning to host it here: jimisaherb.com

@ash78 I wonder if any states release stats on which makes/models have the highest percentage or personalized registrations. It sure feels like Tesla would be at the top.

@tophercrowder some sort of smart trailers for EVs is something that I hadn’t really thought of yet. A trailer with a 20-30 kWh battery would be a huge benefit with something like an F-150 Lightning for road trips without getting crazy expensive. Would be interesting to see if adding the tow vehicle battery or powering itself would make more sense. I can see this working well with flatbeds to carry toys and definitely RVs that wouldn’t need a generator when they got to the campsite. Not sure how feasible it would be to seal it for a boat ramp though.

By far the largest trailer I’ve seen hitched to a Tesla. Spotted near the shore somewhere northeast of Charleston, SC. Hell of a lot of EVs up and down the coast between Charleston and Myrtle Beach actually.

Here it is in all its glory. Drag CR-V.

@TheBarber makes sense. Also means they’re probably paying $5-10k more for cars then when they could do fleet buys which partly explains why the best deal I could get even for a subcompact was like $850 for the week. Upgrading to “intermediate SUV” put me at $970.

@fintail good points all around. I’ve seen Camrys and Corollas in rental fleets since at least the early 2010s and even had a Corolla rental once back in 2016 or so. But any Toyota other than those two was rare.

This CR-V is an interesting spec. Has some things that seem like upgrades over base spec like a sunroof, dual zone auto climate control, and lane keeping. But it has a cheap rubber steering wheel, cloth seats, and no power tailgate. I’m not that familiar with Honda trims (and Honda never puts trim badges on anything besides maybe the top specs and special editions) so I don’t know for sure but if they still do LX, EX, EX-L then it must be an EX.

@fintail now that you mention it I’ve never had a Honda rental before. I’ve heard in the past they don’t really do fleet sales. It always used to be basically big 3 + Nissan + Hyundai/Kia filling rental lots. But this lot had a lot of Toyota, Subaru, and Mazda which you never used to see. (Mostly RAV4, CX5, and Forester.) This is a 2019. Could’ve come from a dealer as a retail sale but goes back prior to the Pandemic and related supply fallout. I guess they could’ve bought it CPO and put it into service? Seems unlikely but I know rental cars are in short supply now.

@WildlyMild I’ve actually taken a rental car to a tire shop once. Was an Enterprise rental Mustang. Prior renter had a flat and put the spare on. They said I could either wait until the next day or take it to a shop they worked with. So I drove on the spare a bit until I could get to the shop. The flat couldn’t be fixed but they threw a new tire on (all tires were pretty much new care had like 1k miles) and sent me on my way charging it to Enterprise. Pretty painless. Good idea I may call and see if they have a shop nearby I can go to. I’m now over an hour from the airport I picked it up at.

@ForSweden if it ever stops raining.

@Ad-absurdum-per-aspera So I checked the paperwork and it is actually Budget. My wife set up the whole rental and Avis and Budget are the same company sharing the same desk and lot and employees working there so I thought Avis since we’ve used them in the past… anyway maybe that has something to do with it? She set up the rental with both of us as drivers and asked me to drive since she was exhausted.

All tires are about the same. Car has over 30k miles. They are Hankooks… I’m assuming they are the original tires at end of life. We’re in a popular vacation spot and it’s the weekend so I’m guessing they are just slammed getting things turned around as quick as possible.