Correction: I made fun of Subaru drivers, not Subaru cars

Dear Mr Baraza JM,

I pride myself in being among the first “official car clinic fans”, having read your articles religiously as far back as mid-2008 or earlier to date, without fail. In that period, I don’t remember any week that I didn’t pore over a Car Clinic article, save for the occasional periods when you took a brief hiatus for whatever reasons.

Before my subject of writing, may I indulge you in a little chatter that will set the tone for my inquiry/interest: for a long time, you often invited us to savour the many positive attributes of your Mazda Demio. Then out of the blues you begun enthralling us on your new-found “love affair” with the Subaru Legacy GT-B E Tune II (BH5) after so much Subaru-bashing. That just happened to be the exact ride I had at the time, a M/T I had owned for approximately eight years! My motoring pals and colleagues were always befuddled by my unwillingness to part with the wagon, and when I finally did, it was for the princely sum of a little less than half of what I got it for. The buyer literally snapped it up on first sight!

On the above subject, I did notice your pinpoint explanation for efficient fuel economy in the BH5 Wagon, narrowing it down to your personal driving skills. That was an important piece of technical info, usually ignored by the vast majority of car owners and the auto motoring world.

In my first year with the BH5, things went south where fuel was concerned. But I had researched into the Subaru Legacy heavily long before I bought it (as a first car, no wonder the problems I ran into, being a novice), and never stopped researching how to safely handle the 280hp machine, having at the back of my mind the notoriety that Subaru owners were famed for, so keen to avoid the same pitfalls.

I joined owners’ blogs online in different markets, asked endless questions, read reviews, logged in the positives and negatives. As a beginner with near-zero auto mechanics background, I learnt a lot. From ignoring the rubbish about Subaru parts being too expensive, expensive maintenance costs, poor resale value (that strange Kenyan animal!), and of course that notorious thirst of the Subies.

To the realisation that I needed a regularly well-serviced Subaru, original Japanese parts, resisting that urge to push the speedometer beyond 120km/h on the Salama-Sultan Hamud-Emali-Makindu-Mtitu Andei-Voi-Mariakani stretch, maintaining low gears (3-4-5) where possible, a disciplining of the right foot and instead using the clutch/gear combi often to slow down the car, as opposed to applying the breaks.

In the beginning I just couldn’t manage anything beyond 9km/lit in normal city driving, that is, home, work, church. By year three onwards, I was managing 12km/lt city driving on average. A trip to Mombasa guzzled somewhere close to 2/3 of a full tank. For 490km, from the fuelling point to Mwembe Tayari, that was a decent saving.

Well, the BH5 went in June 2017, but I am still nostalgic of that behemoth. Which leads me to that curious rider in your article after the many B4 positives, “Subaru's biggest problem: the steering.”

What exactly ails the Subaru electric steering? Could you explain for the benefit of probably many of us in the dark about this problem? Seeing that I went a notch higher with the Outback 2.5i Limited (With Eyesight), very decent in every aspect from a non-expert’s perspective, I shudder at the prospect of coughing out 130 thousand to fix steering issues in the future, how soon I can’t tell. I’ve so far clocked 60,200km on the meter, 16,400 since its arrival.

Finally, I know you have been asked this before, but I forget the link you gave — do you have a blog for paying members where I can dig into some of your archived articles?

Many thanks indeed, I truly appreciate the enormous effort you put into your craft to produce such wealth of information and placing it at the disposal of the reading public.

Regards,

Jeff

Hi Jeff,

A few small corrections here and there, the first being this column appeared on July 21, 2010 for the first time, so you couldn’t have read it “in 2008 or earlier” (In related news, last week marked exactly nine years of this column’s existence. We have come a long way since that initial Toyota Premio review that has a very interesting back story behind it, a narrative that features in my second, upcoming book.)

The second correction is the “Subaru-bashing”.

There was no Subaru-bashing, I was making fun of Subaru drivers, not Subaru cars, and I was getting quite good at it until the events I described on July 17 this year quickly put an end to that.

I agree with you, the BH5 is a very addictive car and not for the reasons people think. Most think I was after the flat-four rumble and bargain-basement bang-per-buck, but no. I was after the practicality offered by a wagon that is longer than a 14-seater matatu, has AWD and is tough as nails. I, like your buyer, snapped up El Turbo without second thought because the price was too attractive to walk past.

The efficiency of the BH5 is not purely pegged on my deft helmsmanship — though a large part of it is attributed to that — the engine has something to do with it too. The twin-turbo EJ208 runs very lean, and the E Tune (II) tag actually stands for Economy Tune.

The first long haul trip I did in that car was damn near unbelievable as I used my consumption calculation methods to reach the conclusion that 12km/l was not what I expected from a twin-turbo Subaru with an exhaust tip the size of a storm drain driven at (redacted) for security purposes] kilometres per hour for several instances over a distance of 441km.

Too bad, as part of your alleged “Subaru-bashing”, I had told a few inquisitive readers that the Legacy GT’s twin-turbo knows neither reliability nor simplicity, and it was the former’s blowing of a head gasket leading to the latter’s repair attempts that marked my old EJ208 for death in a self-fulfilling prophecy and death became it.

El Turbo is no longer the Renbato, the double-bladed sword it once was, it is now Zanbato, single blade, single turbo, powered by a Version 7 WRX engine that is even rortier and more metal than the twin-snailed 200,000km wonder that preceded its tenure under my bonnet. On paper, the EJ20G has less power (230 or thereabouts) than the EJ208 (280 flat), but I kid you not, El Turbo has developed a new sense of urgency that it didn’t have before.

Now I like it for the engine, haha! And guess what? The fuel economy suffered by only 8 per cent: I'm now doing 11km/l on average, up from 12. That is a price worth paying for the vast improvement in drivability.

I, too, trawled the internet for survival tips as a GT owner because I, too, knew the mud pit I was throwing myself into by buying a car with 24 vacuum lines and a dual turbo set-up with a complicated crossover protocol from primary turbo to secondary turbo which creates an annoying phenomenon with a fearsome name: the infamous VoD, or Valley of Death in full. It occurred within the neighbourhood of 4000rpm and this is what would happen:

The primary turbo would report to work nice and early at 1900rpm, not so you’d feel it, but it was there. It stayed online up to about 3500rpm where the engine management would tap the secondary turbo on the shoulder and ask it to wash its face and dress up, duty calls.

To assist the secondary turbo in waking up, exhaust gases would be gradually diverted from the primary turbo to the secondary to start spooling up the secondary until the point when both turbos crossed the boost threshold and provided the surge the driver was so desperately looking for that far up the tachometer.

This means that with the diverted exhaust, the boost provided by the primary would drop off, but the secondary was still not fully alive yet. This meant that within that narrow 700rpm band between 3500 and 4200, there was nothing. No boost.

You were basically driving a long, loud, naturally aspirated wagon very fast at high rpm because you were essentially turbo-less. That band is what is called the Valley of Death, and yes, it is very annoying and can be scary the first few times you experience it.

The situation is aggravated by the extra-long gears endowed to a grand tourer (that’s what the “GT” in “Legacy GT” stands for) with ratios so high that redline in 5th gear means you will be nudging the 300km/h mark, if you have the power to do it.

Those long gears mean that you rev... and rev… and rev… before shifting up. Revving beyond the VoD in a moment of urgency is an exercise in crisis management because the power disappears at the exact moment you need it most.

You wind the thing up and nothing happens, and you cannot down-shift because you will hit the limiter and possibly blow your engine with heads, valves, pistons and whatnot shooting out through the front wheel-wells because of course the engine is flat and the cylinders lie on the side, so they are not upright.

You have no choice but to walk through the valley of the shadow of death and you will fear lost boost pressure because thou art with a needlessly complicated twin-turbo engine that Subaru must have been mad to create in the first place.

Boost life resumes normalcy beyond the VoD, briefly, before you shift up and repeat the process all over again.

(Just to make your life doubly difficult: the stratospheric redline of 8500rpm in the EJ208 sounds titillating in theory, but we don’t have fuel with enough octane to justify you wandering into that dark, dusty, rarely-used corner of your tachometer.

Rev it past 6500 or 7000 and the Check Engine Light starts flashing intermittently — detection of knock. Keep it up and that engine won’t live to see another sunrise, literally).

Now, the steering. In older steeds like ours, the power assisted system is hydraulic, not electric.

And the power steering pump will fail at some point and start spewing fluid in random amounts which means regular top-ups until the day the whole thing goes kaput in which case you either decide to live the life of a go-kart racer and use sheer muscle to steer, or replace the pump.

I replaced the pump along with the engine because the pump had already started going and I didn’t think the cabbage needed for a new pump was money well spent while I still had the old engine.

Newer Subarus, particularly the SH Forrester and BM/BR Legacy come with electrically-assisted power steering systems and… they too are not immune from mood swings and self-destruction. It is a matter of when you will spend that Sh130,000 to replace the rack, not if. Now, sadly for owners of these newer cars, the PAS going on the fritz does not give you the option of going all Ferrari F40 on us, you cannot drive the car at all. You must replace the power assistance set-up.

I did have a “blog” and it contained a lot of archived material (though not my complete works) but it is undergoing transformation as we speak. My own cursory research shows that Kenyans are not very good at unearthing materials hidden behind a paywall, so there will be two levels of the new site: the lightly-designed, soft-journalism free section where any jabroni with an internet connection can haunt, and a sort of “VIP area” that will contain a lot more material, which follows the pay-to-access protocol of established publications such as the Wall Street Journal.