Category: Small Family 
Price Range: £12,730 to £30,350
Great handling, good ride quality, four-wheel drive, unique feel, smooth engines.
Anonymous styling, cheap-looking cabin, not particularly practical, noisy engines.
Still a bit of an oddball, and that's no bad thing.
Subaru builds mechanically tough cars, and those Boxer engines are capable of very high mileages indeed. There were some serious and expensive engine problems with the last-generation Impreza, but these were with grey-import Japanese-market and highly modified turbo models not tuned to deal with British fuel. Otherwise, the Impreza seems to have been impressively reliable - there's lots of anecdotal evidence to suggest that it can run to well over 100,000 miles without any major work needed.
Problem is, it has always felt cheaply trimmed, and this MkIII, although much improved, is still some way behind its rivals in the standard of its fit and finish. The cabin looks and feels dated, with hard and brittle plastics, rough edges and uneven trim detailing. Kia and Hyundai are doing better than this these days with the new Cee'd and i30.
