Subaru Outback

Having silenced the maddeningly intrusive warning beeps and bongs, Charlie Flindt finds himself out and about with an old friend once more

- Charlie Flindt

THE first couple of days in the new Subaru Outback weren’t a great success. It was like meeting up with an old acquaintance, hoping for a week of fun and laughter, only to find he’s joined a puritan cult.

The once free-spirited Outback has been comprehensively shackled by alarms, warnings, beeps, bongs and shuddering steering wheels – although, to be fair to Subaru, this is the way of the world. The ‘face scanning and monitoring system’ is one of the creepiest things I’ve ever come across, although it failed to spot the difference between me checking out the neighbours’ harvest progress and ‘telegraph pole-ing’ the road ahead – so it may have just been shouting “Keep eyes on the road!” at random.