Subaru Tribeca Crossover to Be Discontinued
The Subaru Tribeca crossover will soon be leaving the Japanese automaker's lineup, a victim of slow sales and a general lack of interest on the part of the brand's typically loyal buyers. The Subaru Tribeca is currently the largest vehicle manufactured by Subaru, and it has been in production since 2005.
According to Automotive News, Subaru managed to move just 910 examples of the Tribeca in the first quarter of 2011, which when compared against the car company's otherwise solid sales figures over the past several years indicates that the mid-size SUV has become something of an also-ran in the family marketplace. The Subaru Tribeca is produced at the company's U.S. plant, located in Indiana, and the automaker would no doubt love the opportunity to devote the crossover's assembly line space to a vehicle that could generate more sizable profits.
What went wrong with the Subaru Tribeca? At least on paper, the SUV seems to hit all of the right notes, offering three rows of seating for as many as seven passengers, 74 cubic feet of cargo space and the availability of premium features such as heated leather seats, three zones of climate control and a navigation system. The vehicle also come with Subaru's trademark all-wheel drive system and a high safety rating, two important factors that family shoppers often consider to be important when selecting a daily driver that will be transporting children through a variety of different weather and road conditions.
A closer look, however, reveals a crossover that lagged behind the competition in a number of key areas, including passenger room and fuel economy (16-mpg city / 21-mpg highway from a 256 horsepower, 3.6-liter six-cylinder engine). The Tribeca was also originally introduced with styling that polarized potential buyers, to the point where Subaru seemingly overcompensate by providing a mid-cycle refresh that created an exterior appearance that was significantly blander than most other models produced by the company.
With no next-generation Tribeca in the pipeline - Subaru has reportedly halted all planning or design work associated with future editions of the vehicle - the writing on the wall for the crossover is fairly clear. The question then becomes one of whether Subaru will attempt to breach the large SUV segment a second time with an all-new model, or whether the company will avoid making the same mistake twice and instead concentrate on the sedans, small crossovers and wagons that it does so well. Although so many other Japanese car companies have managed to bridge the gap between the economical and reliable cars that they built their reputations on and the crossovers and SUVs that have generated huge profits over the past 15 years, it appears as though Subaru's audience might not be willing to make the same leap.