The 2014 Subaru Forester is all-new this year and it boasts some impressive off-road capabilities along with the creature comforts families want in a car. It also touts some pretty lofty MPG ratings of 24 city/32 highway. These are darn good numbers for a crossover so I took it for a drive this weekend to see how it would fare on a typical family day-trip.
We started out bright and early on Saturday morning with the car packed full with husband, kids and gear. Our drive began on the highway but our journey quickly took us to the steep, twisted roads of the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts. It’s a beautiful scenic drive, but one that’s not exactly easy on a car’s mileage.
This is not a cruise-control, sit back and relax kind of drive, but one that has you constantly accelerating and braking to manage the changing road and the traffic you encounter. It’s the stop and go, inconsistent kind of driving that practically sucks the gas right out of your tank. I fully expected the 2014 Subaru Forester to come in near the low end of its stated MPG range.
And since this was a family day out, we didn’t just drive straight from Point A to Point B without a stop, but wandered a bit on our journey. There were plenty of stops in small towns that ended up getting us caught in Saturday afternoon traffic and which I expected would even further hamper our MPG average at the end of the day.
I figured we’d be lucky just to hit 24MPG, but the 2014 Subaru Forester fared surprisingly better. When I pulled back into my driveway late that night with husband and kids all comfortably passed out, the car had averaged an amazing 29.9 MPG.
With gas prices rising, the 2014 Subaru Forester turns out to be the perfect little gas-sipper for all those family adventures you have planned for this summer.
Nicole Wakelin fell in love with cars as a teenager when she got to go for a ride in a Ferrari. It was red and it was fast and that was all that mattered. Game over. She considers things a bit more carefully now, but still has a weakness for fast, beautiful cars. Nicole also writes for NerdApproved and GeekMom.
