Scotty Kilmer on Subaru's

Typical Scotty Kilmer hates everything except Toyotas and Hondas. But he was relatively diplomatic with this assessment, other Subaru reviews he's done have been horrible.

His opinions change with model year. He does say Subaru is the best at AWD. He does have a good point about the boxer engine head gasket failures. I had two on my Forester and a son had one on his.

Yes, I've had a head gasket problem on my previous Outback 4-cyl, but it was covered under warranty, and it never happened again after warranty was over. Currently have a Tribeca 6-cyl that is 12 years old, and no head gasket problem on that one ever.

However, he has some very bad misconceptions about the technology behind boxer engines, he seems to think they are old-fashioned and out of date, always citing things like the original VW Beetle having one of these types of engines. And he seems to think they can't produce as much power as other equivalent displacement engines of other types. The WRX and STI were once the highest output engines of their class range when they were first introduced. They haven't been upgraded much since then, so they've fallen behind a bit now, but that's got nothing to do with the boxer design, Porsche uses a boxer 6-cyl too, and that's well above the 500 HP mark.

Head gasket failure on my '03 Forester was at 7 years but only about

40,000 miles. Retired, I don't drive much. Subaru on appeal to their help line rebated about a third of the repair cost. Six years later, it was happening again and I traded it in on a new Forester. Our son's Forester, an '09, had head gasket failure past warranty and he had it repaired and also got some rebate from Subaru. My wife's Forester is 12 years old and still running fine but she was worried that it might happen to her.

I certainly like the boxer engine which adds to the low center of gravity.

Head gasket failure happens on lots of different types of engines, but I think the main reason it's pointed out on Subarus is because of Subaru's H4 engines, which are much like a V4 engine rather than an inline-4. This gives you two banks of heads rather than just one, and much like with any other V engine, head gaskets have to replaced on both banks, rather than on just one bank, making the job more expensive. If it happened on an H6 engine, then there would not much difference between that and a V6, both would have dual-banks, and the cost would nearly identical. But on a 4-cyl, everyone expects things to be much more economical due to most of them being I4 engines, and nobody expects it to cost as much as a V-engine's head gaskets.

True, but interestingly back in the 70's, Ferrari used to use an H12 engine in its F1 cars, as well as its road cars. But they soon had to give them up, because even though they had a low center of gravity, they also had a wide width, which was not good for the aerodynamics that were starting to prevail in F1 at that time, requiring narrow engines that allowed less impeded airflow around them, which was good for the underbody ground-effects venturi tunnels. Even after ground effects were banned, some elements of it remained afterwards which still required narrower engines. Ferrari came up with another 12-cyl engine in F1 in the 90's, but this time it was a V12 rather than an H12, thus making them narrower.

Subaru also looked into entering F1 with a boxer engine back in the

90's, to complement their rally competition, but they decided that the boxer engines would be at a disadvantage in F1, unlike in rallying where they were advantages.

Saw another Scotty video yesterday where he complained about engines, among them Subaru 6 cylinder that have water pump in engine driven by timing chain. If it fails there it could ruin the whole engine. Prompted me to look at my 4 cylinder Crosstrek's and it is external. He does make some interesting points.

And it's perfectly balanced. My wife's two Subes (1999 and 2014 Forester) are vibration-free, which cannot be said for the two V6 Infinitis I have owned in the same period.

I saw that episode too, but I interpreted it differently. His complaint was that because cars are going back to being chain driven rather than belt driven again, that it's now extremely expensive to replace parts that are driven through the chain, because essentially the whole chain mechanism has to be taken apart just to fix even one simple part. My question is are water pumps even that unreliable these days? I mean compared to the entire engine, a water pump is likely more reliable than the whole engine. At most sometimes a gasket might wear out, and that can usually be fixed with a gasket sealer.

Also I've seen him in past episodes, complaining about belt-drives being cheap and unreliable compared to chain-drives. He needs to make up his mind.

Yousuf Khan

No crankshaft counterweights are even needed with a boxer, making it lighter. The two opposing pistons act as each other's crankshaft balances.

Yousuf Khan

I guess his main point was that putting the water pump internal could make for an expensive repair.