Subaru Outback Wilderness Review: The Plastic-Clad Ur-Wagon

Sometimes life's best-laid plans get blown the hell up. In such cases, it's better to have a vehicle capable of rolling with it, willing to take life's punches on the chin and carry on. Like any Subaru Outback — a vehicle that's always placed versatility first. The new 2022 Wilderness version of this Subie stalwart more than lives up to that task.

Last month, my wife and I planned to join my parents and extended family for a vacation on the Oregon coast. That’s the whole extended family. We'd share a single sprawling vacation home overlooking Haystack Rock near Cannon Beach, a family tradition that stretches back decades. I hadn’t made it down in nearly six years, as I was chasing R&T around various offices in the eastern half of this great country. But this year would be different!

We borrowed an Outback Wilderness from Subaru and loaded up its hatch with a cooler full of marinating flank steak, another cooler full of cheap Mexican beer, and the odds and ends needed for a sunny getaway. Suitcases, snacks, bedding, beach towels, a golf bag. The Outback's capacious hold would come in doubly handy too: off the back end of the trip, on the return leg through Portland, I'd squish my new road bike into the back.

Loading the Outback's cargo area couldn't have been easier, even knowing the vacation gear had to be packed smartly, so a large road bike could join the party. The process sounds basic, and maybe insignificant, but there are little things that tend to go overlooked. Packing well can make or break an entire trip. Subaru covered all the bases.

The latches to lay the Outback's rear seats down operate intuitively and smoothly, are oversized and built sturdily. So in a surprise rain storm, you're not fiddling with a little leather pull tag as your gear is getting soaked. It's a vital consideration and a nice touch.

The wagon's rear doors and hatch open wide to allow anything that will fit through the portal created by the unibody's sheetmetal. Again, it sounds like a simple allowance, but consider my Toyota Tacoma's rear seats. Since the Taco's rear doors are limited in their range of motion when opened, rather than opening fully perpendicular to the truck, anything to be stored in the truck's cab must be put in at a severe angle. This limits what you can wedge into the back of the cab. Many long things and/or wide things that should fit in the back simply can't make it past the doors.

It's a problem that reared its ugly head recently when we picked up a set of heavily used outdoor furniture. With the Tacoma's bed entirely full, I couldn't even fit a small chair through the truck’s open rear doors. This necessitated two trips for one set of furniture. Whereas, with doors that open wide like the Subaru's, we could've fit the chairs into the cab.

You can't use every cubic foot of available cargo space if you can't get things through the vehicle's open portals in the first place. To that end, the Wilderness is fit for weekend adventures as well as any Outback. That's to say, it's excellent. You'd have no problem throwing ski bags, or four sets of golf clubs, or even plywood in the cargo area. So long as you don't need a truck bed to throw a dirt bike in the back, many families could make do with an Outback for a week away on the ski hill or at the campsite.

With the Wilderness's hold loaded, we began blasting down from Seattle to the Oregon coast. Infotainment niggles are my least-favorite thing to write about, but there are a few annoyances.

Subaru's infotainment UI is, in general, a mess: not terribly intuitive, often with the things you use most crammed along the bottom edge of the central screen. The HVAC controls are particularly frustrating. Adjusting fan speed on the screen while the car is jostling along the road proved distracting. Same goes for turning on the heated seats or the A/C, or simply getting the infotainment system to its "home" screen. Like my grandpa, who complained endlessly about the print size of the newspaper fearlessly said, THEY'RE TOO DANG SMALL. A row of three good-sized physical knobs could solve the entire problem and leave more room on the screen for navigation and/or music functions, which are often better suited to a touch screen in the first place. The whole system could use re-think, especially with how much real estate is given to each particular function compared to how often each function is used. Thank God there's a physical volume knob on the Outback's console, but the overall lack of physical controls is only made worse by the digital interface's poor performance.

Imagine in the future, a dynamic UI that catalogs the functions you use most, then adjusts the size and placement of these functions on your screen to achieve the highest degree of usability.

Another low for me: The stereo and speakers are among the worst I've heard in a production vehicle. I tried AM radio, FM radio, XM radio, streaming over bluetooth and CarPlay, plus a wired connection from my iPhone, which allowed me to try several different qualities of music, from low-bitrate YouTube nonsense to lossless audio files. Nothing sounded good on this stereo, except maybe the most bass-laden electronica via Sirius XM. But even that was mostly mush. Podcasts, which I listen to daily, were particularly egregious. Whether through the wired or bluetooth connection, I had to crank the volume on Subaru's end to make my podcast hosts' voices audible. Even then, their voices sounded muddy and flat. I adjusted settings on the source side, and tweaked a bit on the stereo's side, to no avail. At some point I just gave up and lived with Sirius XM's Chill station and just let the UNTZ UNTZ UNTZ UNTZ crash over my craven soul in a tidal wave of crunchy bass.

I'd have to budget for an aftermarket sound solution, were I shopping for an Outback. And, keep in mind, I listen to TAPES in my NA Miata through the stock stereo and own a Tacoma, which I previously thought to be the worst stereo on the market. Neither of them bother me enough to consider aftermarket upgrades. That's how low this Subaru's stereo sinks.

The rest of the interior is nice enough. The Wilderness package brings some visual punch-up, little hits of anodized material in a bright copper color. They do a huge amount to spruce up the otherwise dark interior, alongside streaks of copper stitching running along the dash, door cards, and steering wheel. Plus there are some silly little embellishments like Wilderness-branded fabric pieces hanging from the door that mimic a shirt tag. Sure. Why not?