Hi all.  First time Subaru owner here and we are loving out Outback.  Fantastic vehicle.  I have one issue that is more annoying but really is a safety issue.  When going from park to drive, park to reverse, drive to reverse, reverse to drive, and such there is a long hesitation before the transmission engages.  I am usually never in a rush going anywhere so it is fine to wait for the trany engagement, but there have been a few situations where this was an issue.  For example, we all have had experiences where you pull out onto a road where there was a partial blind spot.  Only then to pull out slightly and see a truck or car barreling down on you.  You quickly  need to put the vehicle in reverse to get out of the way.

I did search on here but all the discussions I found were on older vehicles.  I put a phone call into my dealer and should hear back from them with in the next day.  I waned to see if this is a known issue and arm myself with the wisdom of the mass's before speaking to them.

Thanks!

Craig

pretend to shop for a car and test drive another one to confirm "they all do that" before a service writer tells you "they all do that"

I work for a car rental company and have driven just about every model available in North America (except most exotics).  The problem you describe is present in every Subaru product built in the last ten years or so.  The Subarus are probably the worst (and I really hate saying that).

 

Just my 2 bucks

I can attest to a slight delay in both a 12 Outback and 15 impreza. It's fairly annoying when you're use to driving older stuff that doesn't do it.

CVT may be more easily damaged if ANY internal parts are still moving - so 'maybe?' the system purposely prevents shifting for a few xtra milliseconds?

Our Outback is the 3.6r model with the 5eat, the Impreza is my mom's. It is more pronounced in the cvt Impreza and Legacys we drove before purchasing the outback. So you may be right about the cvt needing that extra bit of time to prevent damage.