When I bought my second Rex, I nearly bit the bullet and went STI. But I like to haul more than ass. So I sacrificed balls-out speed for cargo capacity and bought the five-door WRX (again). The good news: starting now, Subaru's hottest rally-bred machine is available only as a hatch. The bad news: the new STI costs $14k more than the WRX. Is it worth it?

The 2008 Subaru WRX is the U.S. pistonhead's cheap thrills with no frills poster child. Meanwhile, the Impreza. Yes, I know: a Subaru without a turbo is like a Mercedes without automatic climate control, but hey, normal people drive cars too. When you move away from turbo-nutter wastegate wonderland, the word “thrills” takes on a different meaning. Or does it? Sans blower, does the new entry level Impreza have what it takes to tickle the fancy of a wider audience?

When the redesigned 2008 Impreza WRX made its New York debut, you could hear the collective creak from the upturned conks of the cognoscenti. What’s with the Camry clone? Somehow Subie thwacked a dart-full of its patented anti-fun serum into the styling of one of the world’s most “enigmatic” designs. But just how bad is the damage? Have Subaru’s efforts to re-brand the rockstar ‘Rex as a kinder, gentler, pop-idol created a yawnster? More importantly: is it possible to be a bad Subaru, but a good car?

According to psychologists, the middle child fights an endless, depressing battle for parental attention. So pity the poor Legacy 2.5i Special Edition, sitting between the WRX and Outback. The WRX is the pistonheads' golden child. Older brother Outback is largely credited with the family's success– despite the fact that the Legacy was Subaru's sales leader in May. The shrinks say lavishing praise on the neglected sib is the best way to cure middle child syndrome. Ah, but is the Legacy 2.5i Special Edition (SE) special enough to deserve it? 

Readers may recall that my previous review of the Subaru Tribeca described the SUV’s front end as a flying vagina. Shortly after this aesthetic assessment hit the web, the San Francisco Chronicle canceled my regular reviews. Both Subaru and BMW banned The Truth About Cars from their press cars. While the column is history and the ban remains, Subaru got the message. The new Tribeca’s front end looks nothing like airborne pudenda, and everything like a Chrysler Pacifica. 

Let’s face it: Subaru isn’t known for building physically attractive automobiles. Their products are the automotive equivalent of the “butter face” girl: everything is great “but her” face. Fortunately, the new Legacy GT (LGT) avoids the brand’s heavy-handed airplane-inspired refreshes, or the new Tribeca’s po-faced Pacifica pandering. The Legacy GT’s not-so-B9 makeover puts the model in prime position for the legions of more mature automotive enthusiasts desperately seeking Subie. 

Back in the day, Subaru couldn’t afford to build a new vehicle to compete in the smoking hot SUV sector. So they took an Impreza, jacked it up a couple of inches, raised the roof and reskinned the body. The result was a hit, and helped define the modern small CUV. Ten years later, the Subaru Forester battles on, facing its third gen competitors (Honda CRV and Toyota RAV4) with nothing more than a few questionable sheet metal creases, a spiffed up interior, and the addition of the turbocharged XT model. The CUV pool’s getting more crowded by the day, and, compared to the Subie’s well-worn REI fleece, the competition looks like its wearing designer duds. We checked out an XT to answer a simple question: is it a classic or a relic? 

I don’t get veggie-burgers. If something didn’t actually die for my dinner, I reckon it should at least have been pretty severely inconvenienced. What’s more, a good burger is always bad for you (arterial distress on a sesame-seed bun). So it is with the Subaru Impreza 2.5i Sport Wagon. Why would anyone buy such an entirely sensible vehicle when they could drive away in a full-fat, hormone-injected WRX Sport Wagon? Why indeed. It’s time for a serious sampling of Fuji Heavy Industries Lite.

A preppy soccer mom wearing steel-toed boots and work gloves. That's the look copped by most wagon-based crossovers. And while grafting raised white letter tires and frightening quantities of ribbed cladding to the family transporter hardly qualifies today's genre-benders for MOMA's parking lot (let alone their exhibition hall), virtually every manufacturer in the segment uses the recipe. Unsurprisingly, all of Subaru's previous efforts became ensnared in the very clichéd design trap that they helped originate. Until now…

The athletic contours of Subaru's attractive Legacy are a welcome departure from the norm. Its tapering greenhouse, sloping backlight and interesting harp-shaped taillamps are inherently attractive. Fortunately, the team at Subaru charged with transforming the Legacy's basic form into an Outback didn't violate that trust. Yes, there's still lower cladding and a vestigial spear of door-ding armor, but both have been smoothly baked into the vehicle's form (available in body-color on certain hues). So even if the 2005 Outback it isn't a picture of modern maternal magnetism, it's still a second-look MILF. The design works particularly well up front, where eagle-eyed headlamps no longer appear malnourished (in comparison to the bumper's elephantine fogs). Handsome, broad-spoke alloys draped in 17" mud-and-snow rated Bridgestone Potenzas mark out their territory convincingly. A wisp of roof rack topside completes the picture.

Without any prompting whatsoever, my 11-year-old daughter took one look at the new Subaru B9 Tribeca and said 'ew'. And there you have it. Scooby's first-ever SUV is an irredeemably gruesome beast whose design should have been aborted a femtosecond after conception. While Subaru would like to convince us that "ugly ass" and "dynamic styling" are synonymous, even a pre-teen knows that repulsive is not, and never will be, the new cool. In the race for SUV buyers' affections, the horrific B9 sets off a mile behind the starting line.

Not to belabor the point, but who in their right mind would put a vagina on the nose of an SUV, and then accentuate the effect with wings and hood strakes AND make the shape stand proud of the grill? Yes, I know: the design reflects Fuji Heavy Industries' past as an airplane manufacturer. But they don't make airplanes anymore, and the ones they DID make attacked Pearl Harbor. While we're at it, the B9's rear resembles the face of a gigantic alien– which is only fitting. Other than its side profile, the B9's best viewing angle is high Earth orbit.

That my trusty sidekick decided to pack it in just days before this WRX STi arrived can hardly be viewed as coincidence. Rather than face the license and physics compromising surety of Subaru's turbocharged, all-wheel-drive juggernaut, my radar detector committed suicide. In the dead of night, leaping from her once-cozy, hardwired and suction-cupped perch, Michelle (my BEL) fatally dashed upon the rocky shoals of my daily driver's center console. It wasn't a cry for help, as nary an ear was around to hear her final (undoubtedly false) bleating. Tragic, yes… but completely understandable given the circumstances.

For as you can plainly see, Subaru hasn't exactly wrought a Q-ship here. The STi is utterly infested with attention-grabbing aerodynamic addenda: skirts, scoops, vents, canards, EVERYTHING. Factor-in the gaping mesh grille inserts, look-at-me STi stickery, 17" 12-spoke BBS alloys, and it's a miracle owners ever make it out of their driveways without police choppers whirring overhead. And then there's the small matter of the rump, where some Suba-guru epoxied a park bench to the decklid, screwing a Dutch Boy finial to the pipework as some sort of perverse coup de grâce.

Subaru has remained 'willfully odd' for eons. The Japanese brand's long-held construction tenets– horizontally-opposed powerplants, all-wheel-drive and eccentric styling– have only recently been embraced by the masses. Okay, so America's roads aren't exactly awash in boxer-engines, but controversial styling is certainly making a resurgence, and we all know how that AWD car/truck thing worked out. Most manufacturers now have at least one car-based 'cute ute' in their showrooms, from Honda's CR-V to the Saturn Vue and Hyundai's roly-poly new Tucson.

With the massive success of its Outback lineup, it comes as no surprise that Subaru decided to fit some lifts and extra-tall glazing on its Impreza platform in search of a few more sales. The resulting Forester is an enigmatic little toolbox with many charms, but an unclear role in the family constellation.