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

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.

Went for a little drive this afternoon. Better now?

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.

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

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.

I made another update to jimisaherb.com - there are a little over 400,000 posts there now encompassing the full time span of Kinja 1.0 Opposite Lock. @Jb-boin and Nanttene got something like 470,000 in their count. I didn't count reposts or cross-posts. I don't know if that was the difference or if there was an error in how I parsed the feeds. I also only grabbed 100 replies from each post because the way Kinja works it is a fair amount more code to grab the replies past #100. In any case, Kinja has shut down the feeds so this is what I have now. I think we got most of it.

Right now all of the images are still being hosted by Kinja. I have no idea if/when they will get deleted. My thinking based on what I have seen is that they probably won't delete the images any time soon (the images aren't associated with the poster or Oppo so they'd need a script to crawl through all of Oppo and pick out the images). But I can't guarantee it. So if you want a copy of anything you find here please archive it now. I'm planning to see if I can make reduced-size/quality image archive but my initial attempts are running slowly and still taking up a lot of disk space so it may or may not happen. I might give up or the images might get deleted.

I don't really know what's next for this archive. Work has gotten pretty busy. (Here is a scary thought for those of you in the US (including myself) - I am managing $5+ million of your tax dollars this year.) So I don't know how much more time I'll have to play with this before (if ever?) the images go poof. I would like to fix some of the broken embeds and formatting, detect links to other posts and make them link to the archive rather than dead end at Kinja, and maybe bring back a more Kinja-style feed view. But we'll see. Maybe over Christmas. The host is paid for 2 years so I hope to keep it online through then at minimum even if it just lives in this state. Anyway - hope at least some of you can have some fun with this.

New formatting improvements are live along with what should be everything posted 2016-2018, about 150,000 posts or so. You'll see a few odds/ends in other years, probably because they got reposted at some point in the 2016-2018 span so they got swept up in the feed but my archive just tracks the final edit date.

jimisaherb.com

Reminder - Images are still hosted by Kinja - if you see something you want to save with the images use a plugin like Save Page WE to grab it because the images might die at any point. Or they might be here forever. It's Kinja. Who knows.

Have fun playing around kids!

I'm out for the night. Decided to go camping last minute with my kids. I'll play around some more tomorrow afternoon and let y'all know if more posts get added.

Found a new place to walk the dogs.

@415s30 I hope so, though a cynical part of me is expecting that they’ll just sunset things like the 4Runner and Land Cruiser when those rules come into force rather than make a PHEV or EV.

@houstonrunner hope you make it back up this way sometime soon! And hopefully I stick around this time to see when that car gets off the boat!

@dr-zoidberg what you did there I see it.

@dogisbadob I looked for a Premium 6MT with the sunroof when I bought mine, but getting that base model Certified Pre-Owned saved so much I went that way.

The transmission wasn't bad, but not great either. I came from a Hyundai Santa Fe with the 2.7L V6 + 5MT and 5 speeds wasn't enough. The 6MT in the Subaru is definitely was definitely a big upgrade in terms of rations. The stick is cable-linked and feels kind of disconnected, but you get used to it pretty quick. The throws would feel long in a sports car, but are fine for a crossover. Clutch feel was fine. Easy to get going, hard to stall, but a little vague on the exact engagement point. Main thing I liked is that it just felt bulletproof. I shifted it very hard many, many times and it felt just the same when I traded it in as when I got it. Never changed the clutch and didn't feel like it was even getting close. I think the transmission is actually the same unit that was in the WRX, which would make sense why it felt indestructible when hooked up to a lot less power.

I love oddball vehicle-powertrain combos as well. If Ford made a manual Maverick I'd be all over it. The Forester was about the last crossover holdout in the US. I think the only thing similar that had a manual longer is the Mini Countryman, and I that may have even been dropped in the last year or two.

@415s30 I'd seriously consider a PHEV or even full EV 4Runner... 5 years from now when I've paid this off anyway.

@hammerheadfistpunch yeah that is insane. That being said, we're seriously considering getting a small RV (around 3,200 lb) and towing it with this instead of the Raptor. The Raptor has a higher tow rating, but its payload is so low that the hitch weight + 4 people would be right up against it.

@mazda616 understood. Subarus are hit or miss on reliability. I've spent my fair share of time in their service departments. As far as dealer service experiences they have been pretty good at least. Back when I had a Hyundai the sales people would come over and hound me about buying a new car every time it went back for a recall.

@taylor-martin I'm gonna make my daughter chauffeur me around like this when she turns 16.

@nickhasanexocet ha yeah the 2.0 in the Impreza/Crosstrek and 2.5 in the Legacy/Outback/Forester are pretty pathetic. My 6MT Forester could just get out of its own way... until you put anything more than just the driver in it.

@just-jeepin Thank you. I just didn't know what the final numbers were going to be so I didn't go in knowing exactly what I wanted to put down. They seemed oddly OK with taking a personal check as well, but didn't bring my checkbook. If you can get one ahead, I would recommend it. At least around here things are going back to as remote as socially distanced as possible again.