Originally Posted By: Eddie
My 2000 Forester was the best and most loved of all the cars ivied owned. Typically got ~ 28 mpg Highway until I sold it with 176,000 miles and never had any major part fail. Lot of cars got better mileage but, not the safety of the full-time four wheel drive. Many people don't figure that one major part failure after the warranty wipes out many many of the extra 2-3 MPG advantage. The bottom line is figuring the total car cost over the normal life (in my case 125,00 + miles or 10 years)
Well, how about the expense of AWD, my friends have a forester that is now 2WD... Something messed up in the centre dif so the service guy just pulled a fuse and now its running just with the front tires being driven. They use snows and haven't really missed the "safety" of AWD too much at all.
I would never buy a subaru expecting to save money on repairs, they are pretty good, but the extra stuff under there all needs to be maintained and does fail from time to time.