When we showed you Subaru's new MPV last week your response was pretty much unanimous: man that is fugly. The car's reception on the other side of the Pacific has been a lot warmer though, particularly for the headlights' signature blue flash; the only criticism is that it's taken Subaru way too long to get this car to market.
The Legacy is the best selling station wagon in Japan, and has been since its inception, but that hasn't stopped its sales figures plummeting as Japanese family men abandoned the old two box format for MPVs, minivans and crossovers largely because they're larger, or more specifically, because they safely seat six, seven, or at a stretch, eight.
While Japan's birth rate may be one of the lowest in the world, multi-generational homes are still common, so when granddad, grandma, dad, mom and the kids head to the ancestral home in the boonies, five seatbelts just won't cut it. Subaru worked on a minivan for a few years, but the prototypes handled like, well, vans and the powers that be decided that they were not Subaru-rashii; they didn't have that thing that makes a Subaru a Subaru.
Plan B was obvious: take a Legacy, stretch the wheelbase a bit, chuck a couple of seats in the trunk but keep the center of gravity nice and low. And on roads clogged with boxy MPVs ( Toyota alone make 10 different models) the result doesn't look half bad. Most importantly it drives more like a car than any of its competitors. The only Japanese seven-seater that comes close to matching the Exiga's handling and performance is the unimaginatively named Mazda MPV, but only when bought in 2.3-liter turbo guise.
