Here’s a idea: Keep the Nissan and just rent a car on Turo if you travel. Huge selection, and you can try something new every time.

Yeah, that’s not making sense to me either, and I’m usually an “All We’ll Drive” type of guy. 

I have a 2007 Outback LL Bean (same basic interior as the Spec B, but tan leather), and I don’t think it’s so bad. Yes, there were a few plastic rattles I had to shim, and yes, the navigation screen looks like a Super Nintendo, but all navs from that era look like that. I only use the nav screen for tracking…

Subaru (i.e. Fuji Heavy Industries) makes the Lineartronic CVT in-house with some design guidance and components from Luk, a German company. In a rare move in the automotive industry, especially for a small company like Subaru, they actually designed and manufacture their own transmission at their Gunma plant. 

The only area I can see an HD truck being helpful for personal use if if you’re hauling a big 5th wheel or horse trailer. Those aren’t 35,000 lbs, but it just means the truck isn’t going to break a sweat towing a 15,000lb toy hauler or something.

I tried to carry an entire fence worth of lumber on the roof rack of my WRX sedan. I got a lot of funny looks in the Home Depot parking lot, and a few people just stood there and laughed.

What years? My brother has a 2015 (the current generation car that went to an all-BMW drivetrain, as oppposed to the Peugeot-derived engines the earlier cars had) that he ordered new from the factory and it’s never had any issues.

This is one of the reasons that I insisted on keeping our garage tidy enough to park both our cars in our insulated garage. My wife didn’t understand why I cared so much about that until she saw lots of others in our neighborhood idling their cars and scraping the ice off the windows every morning.

The 5-6% savings has nothing to do with the shipping cost of bringing the car stateside. Most European delivery programs save the buyers money (or at least cover most of the cost of the trip) due to a loophole in the import taxes for bringing the cars into the US: once it’s been driven for a couple of weeks, it’s…

So... a car company notorious for electrical woes offers an electric drivetrain platform to their competition...

Any fast charging capability? If so, what charging standard? 

Here’s the TL;DR version:

I legitimately laughed out loud at that.

Wanna bet? Roasting the clutch can absolutely cause damage, and the video clearly documents that happening.

I don’t disagree with you, but what $22k semi-luxury sports sedan would you buy in its place?

So why not get the full Alfa ownership experience then?

I agree. I liked the S as well, and I think the 3 would definitely benefit from a HUD, but to the OP, I still contend it’s one of those “don’t knock it till you try it” sort of things.

What I get from this is the Passport is a more expensive Subaru Forester for people that want to tow more than 1500lbs. 

The electric RAV4 compliance car was pretty much what you described, actually. It was a RAV4 with a Tesla drivetrain (no joke). Too bad it was only sold in California, and was plagued with electrical issues between the Toyota and Tesla systems.