2007 Impreza, very high/deeply mounted pedals?

[Frank N. O.]

Good day, I hope it's ok I ask this but this is quite important for me since I might be buying a new Impreza over here on the other side of the pond (it seems to me that most here are from USA) but after a short test drive and test-sit the pedals seemed extremely oddly placed and worse of all they were painful to operate and forced me to sit extremely close to the windshield and wheel and I hope someone here might help me figure out if this is normal, if it's possible to change or I just have to write off one of my biggest dreamcars ever.

The car I drive now has it's pedals around 12.5cm off the floor (4.9in) but when I operated the clutch on the Impreza I had to lift my leg off the ground thereby straining my whole left leg, not to mention the pedals were all much farther away from the steeringwheel than any other car I've driven, and while I'm just 175cm tall (5ft9) then I have relatively long legs so I sit with the seat quite far backwards but I couldn't reach the pedals in the Impreza without having the seat very far forward and even then the height was awful, and my shoe-size is european 45 which isn't small (I think it's around 11 US).

Another concern was that the car's brakepedal was featherlight and had a very long travel with almost no feedback, not very re-assuring. I didn't have a chance to do anything but calm driving, nor did I want to since the car reacted much differently from the cars I've normally driven (this isn't just a bad thing though).

The weird thing was the throttle, now I know it's a very small engine, but it's listed as having a electronic throttle and I've only ever driven one other such car but this behaves just like it, I could press it very far down and there was no enginepower. Halfway down it felt like less than 25% power was given, a very non-linear power-respense unlike all cars I've ever driven in my life, all of which were with cable-operated throttle-valves but all kinds from small sportscars to super-weak microcars and from several different companies and countries.

Furthermore, they said the Subaru Boxer engine has a great sound, but to me it sounded like all other european over-insulated familycars, meaning there was almost no sound at all, and that was with no radio, no noise outside the car etc. Now I'm not one to want noise, especially not from the exhuast but I use the sound from the engine to hear if the car is changing speed or if I need to drop down a gear, or if there are other factors I should be aware of, plus it makes it easy to hear how much I'm revving the engine for starts, a concern much bigger in the Impreza since the pedal was so light it was hard to feel how far I was pressing it down.

Any info on the pedals and electronic throttle and the soft brakes would be appreciated. Me and what's left of my family have been thrue a horrible amount of heart-ache and illness and a new car is paramount both to some pleasure and mobility for us.

Btw in case you haven't figured it out already, it's not a WRX but for me it would still be fast enough.

Greeings
Frank

[freakray]

I don't know why you would find the pedal spacing odd, to me the pedal spacing is fine. Now, when I have had the opportunity to drive European cars like Opel and Peugeot, I have found the pedal spacing odd in those so you may be experiencing the reverse.

The factory exhaust on the Impreza is very quiet, the only way to really unleash the boxer rumble is to pick up an aftermarket system - if you're looking at the N/A aspirated Impreza look at a catback system.

If you can tell us exactly WHAT model you're looking at it would help. Personally I drive an '06 WRX wagon, but the USDM version is different to the European variant in certain areas, so without you sharing what you're looking at it makes it difficult to ascertain what may be different.

Also, what are you comparing to?

[Frank N. O.]

Thank you for the reply.

It's a brand-new version called 1.5R. It's using a brand-new 1.5L DOHC 16V engine with 105hp @ 6400 rpm and 142Nm (105lb-ft) @ 3200 rpm with a 7000 rpm redline. The car is AWD, has the same bumpers as the WRX but without the fog lights and spoilers and only has 195/60-15 wheels although with alloy wheels, the 160hp 2.0R btw uses 205/50-16.

The car we drive now is a weak little 2001 Peugeot 206 XR 1.4 that however is only marginally slower in acc. and top speed to the 1.5R. The other car with electronic throttle I drove was when the 206 just got it's 5-year service, and that was a 307 XR also 2001 model. A more silent, muted, numb car I've never driven, or even heard of. The other cars we've looked at included a Mitsubishi Lancer 2.0 Intense (which has a spoiler-kit, Momo wheel, Evo-like instruments, strutbrace etc.) but while the pedals on that right away felt normal and natural for me then there were other aspects that made it useless for my purpose. The new european Ford Focus was also not itneresting and cost just as much as the Impreza too but had a lot of bad features that would just get in the way.

The main problem with the pedals wasn't the spacing if you mean space sideways, it was that they were mounted so the bottom of the pedal pad was much higher off the ground than any other car I've driven, and it forced me to lift my leg up high to depress the clutch where normally I could have the shoe resting on the floor before I started to use the pedal, and when pressing the pedal down I just had to stretch away from me, but in the Impreza I had to lift the leg up which was such a hard strain that I had a cramp in my leg and foot after 10 minutes calm driving, and nothing after when driving several hours in the 206 after that.

The pedals were also set very far forward (towards the engine, away from the seat) so I had to sit incredibly close to the wheel (and windshielf) just to barely be able to depress the clutch fully. I've driven several cars, from FIAT's to Ford's, Hyundai, Nissan, Peugeot, Citroen, SEAT (spanish brand now run and owned by VW, pronounced Say-At) and no car has ever had such a unnaturally feeling pedal-position. One thing is to get used to a different throttle-response, clutch-point and sound-level, but I'm physically un-able to handle that leg strain due to my health and chronic knee-problems. I wonder if different pedal-pads might help the height issue but not sure.

The lack of enginesound was a problem when trying to sense how much throttle to give to get the car moving without having to look at the tachmometer, so I think it's mostly a matter of too much silencing material in the firewall but that's probably not easy to get removed even by the dealer garage. The other problem with lack of sound is that I can't hear, or feel in this case, when the engine is running too slow to pull at the gear it's in (I had the same problem with the Peugeot 307 btw). The 206 would start vibrating and give a resonans sound, but on the Impreza there was nothing at all so the sensations of knowing what's going on with the car is so far away I might as well have been sitting behind my computer driving rFactor with a non-FF wheel. I really hope something can be done because there are so many reasons to me needing/wanting to be able to enjoy this car.

Edit: I just remembered something, the car we drove was a brand-new (15 miles) Sport Wagon version and we're looking at the sedan version, does the Sports Wagon that always has a reduction gear here have the pedals placed differently? I also read the Sport Wagon has a forward biased torque-split whereas the sedan has a 50/50 split.

Greetings
Frank

[freakray]

I took particular notice of the pedal height this morning and didn't notice anything out of the ordinary, the height seemed pretty normal to me.

Perhaps ask the dealer to show you some different models?

[SabreKhan]

My Subaru's pedal placement is very different from any of my other/previous cars. For daily driving, it's a little uncomfortable (not uncomfortable enough for me to want to stop driving it daily, though), but for track driving the pedals are near-perfect. I also am lanky and find myself sitting much closer to the wheel and the dashboard than I do in other cars. That was a little uncomfortable at first, but again makes it easier to drive on the track. You get used to it. The Impreza is part of a new trend of sitting higher and closer to the dashboard. My friend's Ford Focus has the same arrangement, as do a number of other small cars I've ridden in (Toyota Yaris, Chevy Aveo, etc.). Test drive it a bunch of different times, and rev it all the way up once or twice on a highway on-ramp or two. Also, test the brakes to their fullest. If you have questions about it, test-drive a higher-level trim (WRX, STi) and compare.

[freakray]

I must admit, I find the control of the Impreza a breeze, mostly due to the layout of the cockpit. Maybe it comes down to the fact the car is designed around its rally heritage - ever watch the foot control of those guys? They don't rest their feet on the floor.

[Frank N. O.]

Thank you very much for the helpful replies.

I tried sitting in another one today and this time tried to focus on the controls after adjusting the seat in all directions which I hadn't done on the testdrive wagon, and the bottom of the clutch seems to be an inch higher off the ground than the one in the Peugeot and other cars I've tried, but with the seat down at it's lowest like I have in the 206, which isn't really low at all, then I think/hope the clutch will work after some time to get used to it.
I tried pressing the throttle down to see how far the travel was and it was surprisingly short so I must've tried accelerating at way too low rpm and I guess the boxer-engine and/or electronic throttle just doesn't let you know you need to downshift with groaning sounds and vibration like other engines does. I wasn't able to test-drive the car though since it wasn't a democar but I'll try another dealer tomorrow since we're going out anyway in that direction (furthermore the price this dealer gaves us for the trade-in was just half of what the other dealer offered!).

I can understand the part about the rallycar basis since unlike other cars then the Subaru streetmodels are connected to, and often used as rallycars and rallyracing is a strong part of Subaru heritage and of course a great place to test components. Btw speaking of rallycars, in case you don't know how good you have it in USA then here's the price for a 1.5R in USD including danish registration tax: 43 great big large ones, as Sammy Davis Jr said in The Cannonball Run. And that's not really that high by danish std's, you can't get much of a Golf-5 for that, and only a medium level Ford Focus (all new european model unlike the US-model that's still based on the mk1). If I'm not much mistaking then I could get a WRX STI for that kind of money in USA.

Greetings and thanks
Frank

[Jay!]

Tangent:

Are all Imprezas drive-by-wire for the 2007 model year?

[freakray]

I know all US WRX models are Jay, I won't go so far as assuming all models are internationally though.

[Frank N. O.]

I contacted the biggest dealership and they won't get a 1.5R sedan democar until two weeks from now and that's the last other dealer we have acess to so I guess a proper test-drive will have to wait, although if they'll only get one in two weeks then it'll probably be factory new and therefore impossible to drive at full revs even after a long warm-up period, and the weight figures have risen the more I've looked, from 1250->1400kg and that'll make it slower than the car I drive now, and danish driver's especially on the freeway are too reckless to have that be safe.

Thanks for the help and I hope you all enjoy your cheap cars and cheap gas in the land of the free. Greetings
Frank

[SabreKhan]

Boo for Daneland... mark... You would think with Europe being naught but a train ride away from Arabia that oil would be cheaper. Unfortunately, you would then think about the high tax rates in Europe and the socialist utopia that has not quite yet developed. At least you still have awesome pastries.