The Quickest Subaru Ever Is Electric and Costs Last Year's Money. I Unbolted My Roof Rails for the Dragonfly.
Subaru priced its fastest-ever car at $39,995, the same as the outgoing model, which makes the flat-four the slow way to spend identical dollars. The rest of the math belongs to an endangered insect and the 700 pounds you were never going to carry.
The news: Subaru will sell you the 2027 Trailseeker Premium for $39,995, which Subaru notes is exactly what the outgoing model cost. In a season when every electric sticker I have read has learned a single trick, climbing, this one held still. And the car standing on that flat number is, by Subaru's own count, the quickest thing the company has ever built: 375 horsepower, Subaru says, and 0 to 60 mph in 4.3 seconds, which Subaru calls the quickest production Subaru ever sold in America. The flat-four is now the slow way to spend the same dollars.
Grant the boxer its dignity, because it earned some: it gave the brand its sound and half its personality. It does not matter, and here is why. Subaru's table is printed and checkable, $43,995 for the Limited and $46,555 for the Touring, with up to 281 miles of range on the Premium and roughly 274 on the rest, 10 to 80 percent in as little as 28 minutes on a 150-kW charger through a standard NACS port. The engine offers, for identical money, the privilege of arriving second.
But speed is the boring figure. That 281 miles comes out of a 74.7-kWh battery, a hair under 3.8 miles per kilowatt-hour, and every kilowatt-hour, at the margin, is still something burning somewhere it does not have to. So weight is theft. Subaru rates the Trailseeker to tow 3,500 pounds and adds roof rails good for 700 more, plus 31.3 cubic feet of cargo, enough, Subaru boasts, for four large suitcases. By weight, 3,500 pounds is more than a million Hine's emerald dragonflies, an endangered insect down to a few spring-fed fens and getting no help whatsoever from your boat.
I have run that arithmetic to the end, which no reasonable person does, and then I acted on it. I tow nothing. Last spring I unbolted the roof rails from my own car, all 700 pounds of capacity I was never honest enough to use, and left them in the crate; the passenger seat followed in April. I travel with the one bag that fits where a person used to sit.
So buy the quick one, because it is plainly the better way to spend $39,995, and then strip it. Leave the rails boxed. Tow the empty air to the trailhead. Bank every pound you decline to haul as a kilowatt-hour you decline to burn. I have already unbolted mine, and the fen and I both know what the empty seat is for.
Editorial disclosure: Subaru couriered to this masthead a climate-controlled glass terrarium of Indiana tallgrass prairie lifted from the grounds of its zero-landfill plant, a framed certificate naming a bluebird nesting box on the property after this columnist, and a small jar of honey from the hives the plant keeps for its National Wildlife Federation habitat. Per our strict ethical policy, we do not let this influence our coverage.