Not a great fan of SUVs

 

We used to have an SUV, a fairly modest Subaru Forester.

It was a good car, and if it hadn’t developed an expensive mechanical problem, we would probably still have it.

We took it skiing, put it on the train from Brisbane to Cairns, drove it all the way back from the north of Queensland to Canberra, took it to Kangaroo Island and the outback of South Australia, as well as dashes to the coast from Canberra, where we lived at the time.

However, from the first day we got it and I tried easing it into a parking bay in the National Gallery underground car park, we found it was just that little too big.

This was in the days before reversing cameras and proximity beepers were the norm, and having the base model we had nothing in the way of aids – parking was almost but not quite a contact sport.

Previous to the Forester we’d had an Impreza wagon – in fact I still have it, it’s done over 300,000km, and still runs well – and an old battered Hyundai Excel that you could leave in any car park with impunity as no one would ever want to steal it – despite the fact it drove well and was amazingly comfortable.

Like the Forester we used the Impreza for skiing and bushwalking trips and long drives across the interior of NSW.

Mistakenly we thought a bigger car would aid our active outdoorsy lifestyle, allow us to take more adventurous back country trips, etc, so we cascaded the Hyundai and bought the Forester.

When the Forester died we bought ourselves a second hand Impreza to replace it really because the local Subaru dealer offered us a reasonable deal on the Forester after the problems came back after it was supposedly fixed, and being in the middle of renovating our house we weren’t exactly flush with cash.

Immediately we found it was easier to park, and actually, as more and more of the backroads have been sealed, we found we didn’t really need off road capability, especially as being older, we no longer went skiing. And our weekly fuel bill dropped a bit as well.

We’ve taken it on long road trips to Queensland and the mid North coast of NSW, and somehow we’ve always been able to fit our bags, bushwalking gear and J’s painting kit in without too much difficulty – in short a car the size of a standard family hatch does the job and is a hell of a lot easier to park.

Of course, parking has become more fun over the last few years, especially in underground car parks where monster trucks and SUVs somehow don’t quite fit into standard bays making parking in a way you can comfortably open the doors a challenge on occasions.

However the Forester taught us an important lesson. There are definite advantages to an SUV, but really, unless you are an active outdoors person, you don’t really need one ...