Scooby Dooby Doo, I Love You

THE Subaru XV is another strange concoction from the bestiary of the Dadaist Japanese car-makers.

- Charles Rangeley-Wilson

The late Robin Williams had a stand-up routine imagining God stoned out of his mind putting a duck’s beak on an egg-laying beaver and taking the mickey out of Charles Darwin. Hmm. So, too, the XV?

If the moniker stands for a crossover vehicle, that would fit, I suppose, the design brief of this platypus of a car. It’s just what is crossed over with what and towards what end that I can’t quite fathom, in spite of the car’s many impressive features.

Like all Subarus, it scores well in the safety tests. Not only in Europe, but in Australia, too. In Japan, it recorded the highest ever off-set frontal impact score and, in the USA, the Institute of Highway Safety gave the XV its Top Safety Pick prize.

Like all Subarus, the XV is great in the mucky stuff. It has enormous ground clearance—almost 9in compared with, say, the Skoda Yeti’s or Honda HRV’s 7in.

The car’s proprietary SAWD (symmetrical all-wheel drive) sends power to all four wheels all of the time. This tends to make Scoobys thirstier than many so-called all-wheel-drive rivals, which are only two-wheel drive for much of the time, but it tends to make them better off-road, too.