2005 Subaru Forester X review from North America

Nothing other than some squeaking noise from the instrumental gauge panel. I fixed the noise by putting some weather strips behind it.

I bought my car in Sep 04. At 11,000 miles now and 1 year from the purchase, the car runs perfectly and it had 0 problems.

The engine is peppy especially after break-in miles and revs good. The automatic transmission is very smooth and refined compared to my Nissan Sentra. When flooring the accelerator pedal, the engine revs fast and the transmission shifts smoothly unlike my Nissan that I can feel jolts from the automatic transmission shifting hard.

The car handles like it's on rails and doesn't feel tipsy at all when going fast into corners. A+ handling.

All Wheel Drive - great in heavy rains and snow!!! It feels so sure footed on snow.

The seats are comfortable for long trips.

THE BAD - The factory stereo sounds like it's in water. I replaced the head unit and front speakers with Alpine products. Spent $150 on a head unit and $50 on front speakers. It sounds like 5x better now than the factory stereo. The OEM front speakers were cheap paper speakers.

Road noise - good until 65MPH, but at 80MPH or above, the wind noise gets bothersome. I've found that the door panels have no noise deadening materials when I did the speaker upgrade. Even my sentra had them! I don't know if this is because I have the base X model. I'm going to put some dynomat and see if it helps with road noise.

This car made me a Subaru fan! Will buy another Subaru when the time comes.