This Is The Best Used Subaru For Retirees

So you've retired from your career, and you're looking to enjoy your old age in a car that can take you to all those sights you wanted to see when you were young and broke. Well, a Subaru is a good bet, as the brand's go-anywhere, do-anything ethos is a natural fit for spending your golden years exploring. The only question is, which Subaru do you want?

As you might expect, there's no perfect one-size-fits-all answer. Everyone will have their own preferences for things like styling, seat height, and cargo room. But the biggest criteria around which we'll shape our recommendation will actually come from another source entirely: How you found yourself on Jalopnik Dot Com, the cars website. If you got here via search, that's one set of recommendations; if you're a regular reader, I've got an entirely different suggestion for the car you should spend your next decades in. 

If you got here by searching "Subarus for retirees" on Google, Bing, or Duck Duck Go, your answer is going to come in one of three forms: Forester, Crosstrek, or Solterra. For those looking to get furthest from the beaten path, my recommendation is the first of the three — a Forester is easy to load up with camping gear and golden retrievers, the latter of which I understand are immediately issued to all retirees alongside their gold watch. If space on the inside is of secondary concern to taking up minimum space on the outside, however, the Crosstrek is a noticeably smaller option but still has a lifted seat height that won't make your knees and hips ache when you slide in and out. 

If you're looking to spend a bit more up front in the interest of saving money down the line, though, get yourself a Solterra. The earlier ones aren't exactly impressive — my unpublished working title for my first-drive review called the Solterra "one of the cars of all time" — but those early models have gotten beautifully cheap from used-car sellers. For a depreciated price, you could certainly pick worse ways to get around. 

If your brain is broken enough to make you a regular reader of Jalopnik, though, I have another recommendation entirely. Hell with the staid, practical Forester or economically conscious Solterra, you're retired — free from all of life's responsibilities, and funded by Social Security and a 401(k). It's time to get living all that life you put on hold to make money, and you should start with the absolute minimum amount of sheet metal that you can wrap around the biggest turbo you can buy. 

Get yourself a GD-generation Impreza WRX or STi, or even a GC8 coupe. Get a stupidly oversized turbo, cram it into the engine bay, and experience the kind of turbo rush that you really need all-wheel-drive to manage. You haven't lived until you've scared a relative on a twisty road in a 475-wheel-horsepower ethanol-fueled Subaru that's borderline undriveable in traffic, and you deserve to know what that feels like. Get the tuner Rex of your dreams, and take the knee pain as part of the experience.