Over the weekend my wife and I drove to Putnam Subaru in Burlingame, California, and took a test-drive in both a Subaru Impreza and an Outback.
Both models come with Subaru’s EyeSight ADAS technology, but the Outback carries a slightly more extensive ADAS feature set, so I’ll cover that here.
Adaptive Cruise Control: EyeSight includes an impressive adaptive cruise control feature that has the vehicle both accelerate and decelerate on the highway. It can hold a much slower speed indefinitely, if there is traffic, and then will re-accelerate when traffic clears.
Distance Control: The cruise control comes with a neat feature that allows the driver to set the minimum distance between their car and the car ahead. The distance can be toggled from close, to not that close, to far.
Backup Camera: This is a standard feature on modern cars, but still great.
Lane-Keeping: This system keeps the car in its lane if the driver starts to drift. My experience was that this would help correct minor drifts, but didn’t work for larger drifts, like those a distracted driver would encounter.
Blind-Spot Assist: I didn’t get a chance to test this out, but it was there.
Acceleration Cut-Off: Supposedly the car will cut off acceleration if the driver hits the wrong pedal and starts to speed into a rear-end collision. Curiously, though, it will not automatically apply the brakes — that has to be done manually.
Overall, EyeSight seems great. I am surprised they don’t have a parallel parking feature, but perhaps that is coming on future models. It would be great to see Subaru roll out these features across all of their models.
David Silver 