2017 Subaru Impreza: 6 things you didn’t know

1. There won’t be a manual in the base model anymore, unless you live in the USA, that is. That’s right, the only people in the world who’ll have something other than a CVT between the front seats of their new-generation Subaru Impreza will be our American friends.

2. Torque vectoring on top-spec Imprezas gives a dynamic advantage by braking the inside wheels when cornering to direct more drive to the outside wheels, helping the car turn in and reducing understeer.

3. There’s an all-new platform underneath the new Impreza, and it’s a modular architecture that can be stretched and pulled to accommodate something as large as a three-row large SUV. Dubbed ‘Subaru Global Platform’, it’s the first Subaru architecture that boasts this level of flexibility, and it’ll help Subaru reduce the engineering cost of its future cars.

4. Subaru has gone to great lengths to give the new Impreza an upmarket feel. Even something as mundane as the power windows have come in for a technology makeover, with new switches that feel better under your fingertips and a motor that slows the window down in the last few centimetres of travel to eliminate the ‘thunk’ that normally happens when the glass slides home.

5. Subaru’s parent company Fuji Heavy Industries was born from the ashes of the Nakajima Aircraft Company, which was prohibited from building airplanes after the end of the second world war and turned to automobiles instead. Subaru says its aircraft-building heritage can be evidenced from the Impreza’s extensive glasshouse, which provides an expansive view of the road ahead.

6. While many manufacturers will describe a facelifted model as “all new”, the 2017 Impreza really is an entirely new model. A whopping 95 percent of its components are new and specific to this model, with the remaining five percent being made up of generic bolts, nuts, screws and plastic clips.