- 2026 Ascent 3-row SUV packs off two kids to college across the country.
- The Ascent eases a 2,200-mile trip over seven states, four nights, three cars, two colleges, two kids, one dad.
- The $52,615 Touring trim netted 24.2 mpg.
Parenting advice comes in as many varieties as car models. Two pearls that have shone through 20 years of parenting are: as soon as you think you’ve got this parenting thing, the kids hit the next developmental milestone, and you’re learning all over again; the second is that your heart will ache.
On a 2,200-mile college road trip from the suburbs of Chicago to northern New York, then the shores of Massachusetts and back home, I had more than enough time to be reminded of these truths. The numbers were easy: seven states, four nights, three cars, two colleges, two kids. The last part was not.
The sag wagon for this trip was the 2026 Subaru Ascent. The 3-row SUV is an evolutionary leap from the 2005 Subaru Forester 5-seater they grew up in. Yet the Ascent hasn’t been redesigned since it first launched in 2019. Subaru’s largest vehicle and most capable family hauler is aging. I can relate.
In the crowded midsize 3-row SUV segment, the Ascent doesn’t stand out in any particular way. And that’s just fine. The 24.2 mpg we averaged reflects its lack of a hybrid option. Yet the reliable turbocharged 2.4-liter flat-4 engine is durable for the long haul, as long as you stay on top of oil changes. Its third row and cargo space are on the smaller side, and it’s at least a few inches shorter in length than the Chevy Traverse, Honda Pilot, and Kia Telluride. Yet, that makes the Ascent more manageable to park, easier to fit into crowded garages, and — if it were to be passed on to a new family driver — safer to navigate school lots.
It’s not stylistically flashy or a mountain climber or a rocket ship and it doesn’t aspire to be. It’s safe, reliable, practical, and comfortable. It’s fine blending into the background, ever-ready when called upon.
I relate again.
Packing the Ascent
The cargo room expands from 17.8 cubic feet behind the third row to a capacious 75.6 cubic feet with the second and third row flat. What that means to people who think more in bags than in feet stuffed in cubes is that with all seats up, you could fit five or six double-bagged grocery bags. Or if you had to carpool the starting pee-wee hockey team, you might fit their duffle bags stacked on top of each other, as long as the goalie and her gear were on the roof, where they belong.
With the seats folded down, it fits dorm room and furnished apartment essentials: dartboard, guitar, and amp; bins, bushels, and bags; shirts, shoes, and skirts; jackets, rackets, brackets, and whatsits.
No Lorax, no Bone, no Potter, no home.
There was also room enough for a tent and a sleeping bag, just one.
On the Road
The Ascent Touring was the third car in our cross-country caravan and the only one that would be coming back.
In the dawn’s early light of the packing process, and again at a terribly inefficient fuel stop, I suffered a classic Dad crash out. The Ascent Touring was the lead vehicle of a 3-car caravan, and the only one coming back. I didn’t like them taking their cars any more than you.
But we had a job to do and a 28-hour window to cover seven states in 1,100 miles with two stops. Keeping a 3-car caravan together during Cleveland’s rush hour in construction and again in the desolate darkness of upstate New York caused undue anxiety.
But with the Ascent as the talisman, we made it to my son’s apartment in Rochester, New York, with some slaphappy laughs and a 6-hour respite before the 5 a.m. departure for leg two to Easton, Massachusetts. We left his car behind, brother and sister together in her car following the Ascent as bleary-eyed as the fog over the Finger Lakes.
This softened me. The leather seats with heating and cooling, as well as lumbar and thigh adjustments on the top Touring trim, helped keep the exhaustion at bay. The many safety reminders kept me alert, as intended, if not annoyed; adaptive cruise control did most of the driving so I could do most of the reflecting.
We’d done this so many times, so many miles over so many states over all the years, but never apart. The two of them together, closer than their 17-month age difference, sharing playlists, bickering over when and where to stop and for what during Apple CarPlay calls, pulling up beside with silly faces and fading with unknown gestures, encapsulating 20 years of my life in my rearview mirror.
We beat the start of move-in orientation, hustled everything from the Ascent into her dorm, where her brother built a shelf and, with a hug and hello, their mom and grandmother helped set up her room.
Simultaneously, so long ago and not so long ago, we had plans to step out of the Forester into the Ascent, to grow our family in the Subaru way. But plans met the unplanned, as they do, and our paths parted.
I left and parked her Hyundai Santa Cruz, the bed stuffed with hockey and training gear, then stretched my legs around the beautifully wooded campus.
Here again, two roads diverged in a wood.
These Birds Have Flown
After a night in Boston followed by some rain-soaked goodbyes, the return trek from Easton to Rochester concluded for the second goodbye of the day. With a few hours of daylight remaining, I set up camp to catch the sunset over Lake Erie and to breathe. It cleared the congestion in my chest, smoothed the nagging of if I had done all I could, and the knowledge of all I could have done better.
With such preoccupations, it was sweet relief not to have to worry about the car.
The rain fly was missing from the tent. My daughter had last used it to camp with friends this summer. My typical double-check of equipment got lost in the college packing shuffle. When the storms thundered over the lake at 4:30 a.m., I smiled. If she were with me then, I would not have been smiling.
I crawled off to sleep in the car. I don’t know if an air mattress would’ve fit, but the sleeping pad, sleeping bag, and cracked vent of the sunroof were enough for a bit more bittersweet sleep. That’s not on the spec sheet: with the folded second row seat pushed back to the folded rear seats, the Ascent can double as a camp bunk for a wet 5-foot-8 dad. To my Subaru surprise, I didn’t come home alone. Somehow, in some mystic Subaru way, a grasshopper clung to the passenger side mirror some 700 miles, from Erie, Pennsylvania, to home, as if to remind me that even when we’re alone, we’re not alone.
