Subaru achieved something unusual this year. The Japanese brand won two of our Brand Image Awards. We think it’s worth taking a moment to explain why.
Cars are simply unlike anything else Americans buy.
We need to trust them. If a car lets us down, it can upset our daily routine. We can miss crucial work appointments or time with family and friends. It can impact our budgets for months.
We like to enjoy them. If a car is fun to spend time in and feels like an expression of ourselves, it can lift our mood on a bad day.
People rarely identify with their appliances or furniture to the extent that we identify with the cars we drive.
A car you can rely on and enjoy without breaking your budget is a fantastic buy. With that in mind, we find it remarkable that Subaru won both our Most Trusted Brand Award and our Best Performance Brand Award in the affordable car classes for 2022.
About the Brand Image Awards
The Kelley Blue Book Brand Image Awards recognize automakers whose model lines of cars, trucks, and SUVs create enthusiasm among shoppers. Brand image isn’t just about consumers being aware that a brand exists. The automakers that claim them have brand images that excite and attract new car shoppers.
The awards are based on consumer automotive perception data from Kelley Blue Book’s Brand Watch study. Kelley Blue Book’s Brand Watch is an online brand and model perception tracking study that taps into more than 12,000 in-market new-vehicle shoppers annually on KBB.com.
It offers insight into how shoppers perceive important factors driving their purchase decisions and how new-car shoppers feel about car brands and models.
Most Trusted Brand
At this point, it would be a surprise if Subaru didn’t earn our Most Trusted Brand Award. The company has taken that trophy home for eight consecutive years.
Our research shows that consumers know the Subaru name and associate it with dependable cars. The company has defined a niche in the automotive world, offering just a handful of models, each with a pronounced identity.
Most are built around a proven formula. They tie Subaru’s proven symmetrical all-wheel-drive (AWD) system to low-mounted engines (keeping the weight close to the road enhances handling balance) and durable drivetrains built for the long term. They build them into cars with a desirable blend of outdoor adventure appeal and everyday commuter practicality.
Car shoppers know what they’re getting when they invest in a Subaru. Winning our Most Trusted Brand Award every year since 2015 proves it.
Best Performance Brand
For the third year in a row, Subaru also took home an award you might not associate with long-term dependability: our Best Performance Brand Award.
Performance can mean many things. Impressively, the Subaru lineup embraces almost all of them.
Sporty 2-doors with affordable sticker prices are almost an endangered species, but the Subaru BRZ fits the bill. The only rear-wheel-drive Subaru, it hits all the notes of an old sports car standard. The BRZ is lightweight, comes at a reasonable price, and offers stoplight-to-stoplight fun.
Enthusiasts associate the Subaru name, however, with a different kind of performance. The WRX is a legend of off-road rally racing. All-new for 2022, it offers a considerable 271 horsepower and standard AWD with torque vectoring – a race car in a road car package.
If performance, to you, means getting your kayaks to the launch point no matter the terrain, both the Outback and Forester offer a rugged Wilderness trim that’s capable well off the pavement.
Putting it All Together
In 2022, car shoppers have a wealth of great choices. Nearly every automaker offers some compelling products that are more reliable than the cars of a generation ago yet still fun to drive.
But we’re not sure any automaker understands its assignment as well as Subaru. It has the remarkable distinction of building an entire lineup where almost every product is built on proven technology and is still very appealing.
That’s how one of Japan’s smaller brands, by sales volume, has managed to win two of our most important awards over and over. See Subaru models for sale near you
