Tech Is Our Subaru Forester Hybrid's Achilles' Heel

• The Subaru Forester Hybrid is a compelling compact SUV on paper.
• Living with one in our One-Year Road Test fleet has shown many weaknesses, particularly around tech.
• Subaru's dated infotainment system is particularly bad.

Part of that is purely aesthetic. It looks hopelessly dated and the graphics are not as sharp as you'd expect from a brand-new vehicle. Unfortunately, it goes beyond a poor design. We've experienced lag when trying to use both Apple CarPlay and the native applications on the touchscreen. And that's a shame because while there are some physical buttons along the dashboard and center console, you're still using the touchscreen quite a bit. 

The screen itself is large, which is cool, but it completely washes out in even the littlest bit of direct sunlight. The system is also slow to boot up and will often freeze/crash when connected to Apple CarPlay. This sort of thing wouldn't be acceptable a decade ago. How is it still OK in 2025?

There's hope!

Subaru introduced a new infotainment system in the 2026 Outback, and it's leaps and bounds better than the current Starlink setup. How quickly this tech makes its way into the Forester is unknown, but I really hope it's sooner rather than later.

What about the driver assistance systems?

Our Forester Hybrid has a lot of advanced driver aids, including adaptive cruise control, lane centering and a backup camera. Unfortunately, I found all three of these aids to be lacking to the point where I stopped using them altogether.  

The backup camera is quite grainy, making parking lots look like the settings of particularly low-budget found-footage movies. And the adaptive cruise control can't seem to decide what speed it wants to go, constantly having to increase engine revs to speed up. That leaves lane centering, which tends to ping-pong the Forester within the lane and reminds me a lot of bowling with bumpers. Again, not in a good way. 

We'll explore some of this SUV's good graces as we continue with our yearlong road test. But for now, while the Forester is definitely better than it used to be, it still came in 9th place in our recent 10-car compact SUV comparison test, and tech is the big reason why. 

Photos by Keith Buglewicz