You gotta love a vehicle that has the power and performance to haul ass, plus the cargo space to haul everything else. Here in the states, it’s a combo we usually associate with high-performance SUVs, but overseas, there are a few other options. Our friends over at Car Throttle decided to explore a couple alternatives from Japan in this nine-minute video review, including the Subaru Forester STI and Mitsubishi Evo Wagon, and after watching the vid, we were left wondering what it would take to get one of these bad boys into our garage.
Car Throttle starts with the Forester, a tall-bodied five-door packing a turbocharged 2.5-liter boxer four-cylinder engine and symmetrical AWD. The particular example on display here is tuned, arriving with around 350 horsepower at the wheels. “It is pretty brutish, it’s very fast, incredibly practical, and on roads like this, it is the ultimate weapon,” exclaims Car Throttle host Alex Kersten.
Cheap-o interior plastics and poor mpg figures aside, the Forester STI is quite the chariot. But per tradition, Mitsubishi has an answer to the Subaru challenge (or at least it did, once).
The second half of the video is devoted to the Evo wagon, the long-roofline version of Mitsu’s legendary rally sedan. Compared to the STI, Kersten says the Evo has lighter steering, but with a quicker ratio. “It’s more direct, and the car feels so much sharper, it feels lower to the ground, because it is lower to the ground, and it’s just way more of a tarmac car than the Forester is.” Making the Evo go is a turbo 2.0-liter four-cylinder and high-performance AWD system with multiple drive modes.
The want is strong with us for both of these machines. Which would you rather have?