Subaru BRZ review: 2023 long-term test

Fresh off its success in last year's Performance Car of the Year, Subaru's hot new BRZ has spent a few months in the Wheels garage. Let's see how it goes with editor Andy Enright.

JUMP AHEAD

• Update 1: Rear admirable
• Update 2: Zed's not dead!
• Update 3: Top Gunma

Rear admirable

Price as tested: $41,590 (+ORC)
This month: 1202km @ 8.7L/100km
Overall: 1202km @ 8.7L/100km

Melbourne is doing grey and wet once again. Port Phillip bay seems to have become a North Sea tribute act as the mercury hits single digits day after day and endless low pressure systems pile upon each other. And you know what? I love it.

That’s because of the latest acquisition into the Wheels garage. Keen to inject a cosier CoG into the mix of wall-to-wall SUVs, we’ve slotted in a Sapphire Blue pearl Subaru BRZ S.

Manual, of course. In case you’re not fully up to speed on BRZ trims, the S doesn’t add anything to the 174kW/250Nm quota under the bonnet, but does introduce leather and Ultrasuede heated front seats, for which Subaru tacks another $1300 to the invoice and another three kilos to the kerb weight.

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Show the BRZ a deserted wet roundabout and it’ll happily give you a taste of its handling talents and that’s with all the stability control switched on. Switch it into the halfway Track ESC setting and it’ll let you have huge amounts of leeway, so exercise a little care when engaging this mode on road. Or on track, come to that.

Either way, the BRZ is huge fun when the surface is a little slippery, with fantastic steering, a benign chassis and, unlike its predecessor, no cavernous hole in the middle of its torque curve.

The cabin is straightforward, without too much in the way of adornment, but the main controls are ergonomically sound. The headlights swivel, are dusk-sensing and self-level but don’t automatically dip for oncoming traffic.

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Because this is a manual car it also misses out on Subaru’s EyeSight suite, so you don’t get adaptive cruise, AEB, lane-keep assist and lane departure warning. The boot, at 201L, is smallish and filled largely with a full-sized spare, so most of your shopping will emerge smelling a little rubbery.

Unfortunately, my spell with the BRZ was temporarily interrupted after driving it through a pothole that looked like the design template for the Kalgoorlie Super Pit.

The car’s gone back to Subaru and a buckled alloy wheel has been diagnosed, evidenced by the subsequent tremor in the steering at speed. Having dodged around 500 potholes all day on frankly shocking local roads and made it to within a few kilometres of home, it was doubly galling.

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Absence makes the heart do something or other though, and I’m genuinely missing the BRZ. It’s easy to forget quite how capable it is.

When tested at Phillip Island for MOTOR’s last PCOTY, its 1:54.41s lap time was quicker than every car from PCOTY in 1994, beating the Porsche 964 Turbo by around two seconds, the Honda NSX by nearly five and the FD Mazda RX-7 by almost eight. Indeed its 14.24s 0-400m time was identical to the hundredth to that of a 3.2-litre Honda NSX pedalled by Dave Morley in 2002.

On road, it feels a really well judged package. No, the gearshift’s not as sweet as that of an MX-5 but it’s still a good ‘un. I’m just counting down the days until it’s back. That and praying for rain.

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Zed's not dead!

Price as tested $41,590 (+ORC)
This month 675km @ 8.8L/100km
Overall 1877km @ 8.8L/100km

There's a lot to be said for a car that delivers excitement at vaguely legal speeds. Many years back, I recall the ex-editor of this mag, Bill Thomas, complaining that a Mitsubishi 3000GT was too easy to drive, before being chewed out at volume across a Welsh bar by LJK Setright. “No car is too easy to drive!” boomed Setright. Think Gandalf and ‘you shall not pass’ and you’ll get the vibe.

I’d take issue with the late Setright there. True, any car will get up on its toes if driven hard enough, but how those limits correspond to the public highway is another matter altogether. That’s what makes the Subaru BRZ something to revel in.

With no turbocharger, you have to work the 2.4-litre powerplant, but the rewards are well worth it, and it feels naturally at home on a twisty road where you’re changing from the upper reaches of second into third and back.

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The top of second butts close to 100km/h, so the perfect BRZ road is a quiet hill route with a 100 limit and plenty of shape in the corners. I attended the launch of the original Toyota 86, held in 2011 in Montserrat, near Barcelona, and the roads were exactly like this.

Unfortunately they merely served to illustrate the torque deficit in the 2.0-litre engine, the game 86 being outdragged up long inclines by diesel Vectras. It was a disaster of a venue at the time, but the bigger FA24 engine in this car would be a joy to punt up to the hilltop monastery.

Some have complained that there’s not enough exhaust sound in the audio mix, and I can see the point but I have no contention with the Active Sound Control system that mounts a speaker behind the dash. Were I absolutely besotted with the sound of a typical flat-four, I might feel it was a little unfaithful to the architecture, but I’m not so I don’t.

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It’s good to have the little Subie back in the garage though. It took fully six weeks for the car to be diagnosed after its unfortunate trip through a jarring pothole. A bent wheel was the issue and another was sourced, but while fitting it a sensor went on the fritz and had to be back-ordered.

I’m hearing this a lot from owners of many brands when having their vehicles serviced. Being out of your car for weeks due to parts shortages is zero fun.

Upon return, the car would seemingly no longer talk to my phone’s Android Auto installation. I bought a new cable to troubleshoot that link and checked that the app was updated, but it turned out that the related Google search app also needs to be updated in order for everything to work.

There have still been the odd instances when the connection seems problematic or drops out while driving. I’d be interested to hear whether any other BRZ owners have encountered instability with their wired phone-mirroring connections.

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It’s great to have EQL89C back though. I recently went for a blat back-to-back with a Porsche 992 Carrera and, after swapping back and forth throughout the day, I can honestly say I had more fun in the BRZ, a car that’s a sixth of the price of the Porsche.

The 911 felt as if it was only just getting into its stride, whereas the Subaru was absolutely in its element. At those speeds and on those roads, the Porsche was insouciant where the BRZ was involving.

Setright may not have agreed, but in that scenario, yes, the 911 was too easy to drive. Getting more from a car more of the time has to count as a win. Right?

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Top Gunma

Does the BRZ have layers to its personality? Spoiler alert: No

Price as tested: $41,590 (+ORC)
This month: 2920km @ 8.4L/100km
Overall: 4747km @ 8.6L/100km

It’s been a bit of a love-in with the Subaru BRZ of late, so I thought I’d redress the balance somewhat and iterate what irks me about living with EQL89C. On balance, I reckon this is the best affordable sport car I’ve ever driven. It’s not perfect – an MX-5 has a sweeter transmission and the FA24 flat-four isn’t the most melodic partner – but it gets so much right that it earns itself a stack of credit.

Drive one hard and it’s about as much fun as you can ask of a road car. The niggles start to appear when you dial things back a bit, such as those occasions when you have somebody in the passenger seat who doesn’t approve of ‘exuberant’ driving.

Remove that element from the BRZ and it doesn’t have much of a Plan B. Road noise is significant, shift smoothness from first to second can be tricky to finesse when you’re not slamming it through like a pool break, the low hip height means you’re dwarfed by other traffic and the engine is at its least charismatic when you’re short-shifting through the gears.

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In other words, your partner would probably prefer it had you put the money towards something like a Golf GTI.

That’s the beauty of a hot hatch; it manages its compromises really well. The BRZ, on the other hand, packs in a lot of driver focus for just over $40K and it too has seen a number of compromises in its development. What does a keen driver really value? Soft-touch plastics throughout the cabin or Michelin Pilot Sport 4 tyres? A ten-speaker branded stereo or an ESC track mode?

One thing that you definitely can’t have on the manual version is the EyeSight suite of safety gear. Where the automatic gets gear like lane departure warning, rear cross-traffic alert and adaptive cruise, the manual feels more basic.

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Still, at least Subaru has the decency to price the manual car at $2800 less than the auto as a result, unlike Toyota, which charges the same for manuals and automatic variants in the GR86 line up.

I’ve been in and out of the BRZ this month as test vehicles come through the office. Every single time the test car has gone back, I’ve been glad to get back into the Subie. That’s one heck of a compliment when we’ve had cars as good as the Nissan Z, the Porsche Cayenne Turbo GT and the Bentley Continental GT Speed to drive.

One thing I did notice when driving back from a long high-country drive route recently was how poor the dipped-beam headlights were. The throw on the lights meant that the maximum speed you’d happily drive and be able to stop for a waddling wombat was about 60km/h.

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I checked the manual for details about the automatic headlight levelling system and it noted ‘In certain circumstances, the headlights may become misaligned, and the headlight beam leveller will not reset them to the proper angle. This may occur after transporting your vehicle on a flat-bed truck.’

Exactly the scenario when the BRZ was carried away after its pothole encounter, then. Hmmm. This requires the headlight alignments to be checked over by a Subaru dealer.

Something to think about if you have a very steep driveway, I guess.

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Having seen recent pricing for the Toyota GR86 ($45,390 for the equivalent GTS model, some $3800 more than the BRZ S, manual for manual) and spoken to those who’d placed deposits for the Toyota, it’s clear that some are cancelling their GR86 orders and instead trying to bag a BRZ before the order bank blows out or Subaru cave in to the laws of supply and demand and again raise prices of the BRZ S.

The Subaru’s sticker price had already lifted by $1400 over winter with distributors citing “increases in costs associated with production and logistics”.

Even at the higher price, the BRZ S is still outrageous value for money. Just make sure you have ample occasion when you can drive it in a suitably expressive manner.

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