The 2019 Subaru Ascent, Subaru’s largest SUV to date, became instantly famous for one statistic: 19 cupholders, which works out to nearly 2.5 cupholders per seat. It’s as if they know us! They really, really know us. One Big Gulp is not enough for America. Heck, 19 Big Gulps may not even be enough, but it’s a start. I’m off to test those cupholders and the car attached to them. What do you want to know?
Subaru has flown me out to Oregon to test the Ascent, where it will be at home among its crunchy people. I fully expect to see hordes of these with various cause-related stickers eating away at the rear hatch paint soon.
This isn’t just the king of impending bladder pain—this is the biggest Subaru ever made. It has the marque’s usual symmetrical all-wheel-drive and a turbocharged flat-four 2.4-liter engine good for 260 horsepower and 277 lb-ft. of torque.
Like the Volkswagen Atlas that I drove last year, it has three rows and a 5,000-lb. tow capacity. The launch event information even mentions a towing demo, so that should be interesting to me, a person who loves to race cars but hates driving the big, bulky conventional tow vehicles that usually drag said race cars to the track.
Will it also be as nice for a smaller number of kidless-types to cram full of camping gear and hit the great outdoors? Or will it be harder to snooze in? Given that I flew in directly after covering a full-24-hour race, sleeping somewhere and anywhere is a given. We’ll see how easily I fall asleep riding in the Ascent.
But I’m not here to convince one of Subaru’s smiling PR-types to toss a sleeping bag in our tester for my own nefarious (read: tired) reasons. I’m here for you, the readers. What do you want to know about Subie’s big behemoth?