by Panope » Thu Oct 29, 2015 10:15 pm
I will detail a very bad experience my wife and I had with a 2003 Forester.
But first I will describe the absolutely brilliant experience I continue to have with my 1998 Outback. The Outback has 280,000 miles (450,000 km) and is still solid as a rock. It did get the requisite head gasket repair at about 120,000 miles and just like they say, the head gasket job is "a bump on the road to 300,000 miles". Very little unscheduled maintenance has been needed: I did replace a rear strut when it became stiff. Many of the dashboard light bulbs are burnt out. One of the rear seat belt buckles is inoperative. The ignition coil, spark-plugs, and plug wires were replaced. That's all that I can remember.
The car still drives perfectly. It has never been aligned and tires show no abnormal wear. The thing sticks to ice (with 4 wheel studs) so well that you can not have any "fun" with it even if you try.
So with that background, I found a second hand 2003 Forester with about 70,000 miles for my wife to drive. On the test drive I found a couple glitches (rear defrost inop, and a few broken plastic bits in the interior) but figured this would be a solid car needing only the head gaskets replaced at around 100K miles. I was wrong.
The car pretty much had something wrong with it the entire 3 years we owned it: Rear windshield wiper motor shaft corroded, Power window mechanical failure, Interior plastic trim literally falling on the floor, Broken cup holders, Glove box broken, Constant burning of exterior light-bulbs, Heated seats failed (both), and on and on. Most of these problems were common to this vehicle as others had posted YouTube videos of repair techniques.
The head gaskets failed right on schedule but we were expecting this and paid Subaru the $2,500 bucks to fix it. About a year later, I noticed a drip of coolant in the driveway and all I could do is yell fuuuuuuuuuuuuck! Soon after it started consuming coolant at a very slow rate - fuuuuuuuuuuuck!!!
I immediately forbid anyone to drive the car thinking that the gasket just might last long enough to get to a car dealership for a trade-in. And that is exactly what we did - traded it in on a new Toyota...
I know it was wrong to unload the car with a known problem but I was at whits end.
Bad me.
Steve