Quote:
Originally Posted by Eric5273
My mom has the new 2014 Forester, her's is the Limited with the leather, navigation, etc. I've driven the car quite a few times, and here is how I would compare them:
1) Forester is significantly larger and has much more rear space room and a little bit more trunk room.
2) If you compare a Forester vs. base model X1 (no fancy interior trim that comes with the different packages), the interior design is rather similar. Both have areas of soft touch plastic, both have some hard plastic, and both have silver painted plastic which is supposed to look like aluminum.
3) For the money the Forester has more features for the dollar.
4) The X1 handles much better and is much faster.
So basically it comes down to how much you value performance. The difference in performance is not small. If that is not very important to you, then the Forester is an excellent car. It's comfortable, and performance is decent, but it's not a BMW.
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Thanks for this info. I found it very helpful. The forester is taller (66 in vs 60), I believe you seat a couple of inches higher. The rest is due to higher roof line. Other than that they are about the same width and length (180 vs 176). So practically in terms of parking space requirements with rear view camera standard on Subie I would say they are the same size, unless you get rear view camera on X1.
The power in the manual forester that I drove was adequate (I guess low curb weight and no sunroof helps a lot here). An X1 with AWD and sunroof weighs more than 3800 lbs. The Forester weighs only 3250 lbs. With sunroof and CVT I guess it will feel much slower. I agree that X1 is much faster but for me the performance of Forester manual was OK and the fact that you had to push it adds some fun factor, vs X1 where you have to hold back to avoid tickets and 15 mpg.
I noticed X1 handled better, even with sunroof, but the fun factor of better handling in X1 is partially offset by manual transmission in the Forester, for me at least.
I have not driven an X1 without sunroof, has anyone noticed a difference in handling? I guess the sunroof weighs about 80 lbs, and being that high it should be noticeable even in regular driving.