Subaru Wagon Range

Any vehicle of this age has to be approached on an individual basis. It’s likely to have covered a lot of kilometres by now, so any major (or minor) component could be well past its best.

Any Subaru transmission that doesn’t shift properly or is slow to engage a gear or shudders under acceleration needs to be either investigated further or avoided completely. Don’t forget that the Liberty was all-wheel-drive, so that places extra strain on the transmission as well as making for a more complex arrangement if it does need to be repaired or replaced.

In high-performance Subarus (such as the WRX) the transmission was something of a fuse if the driver got a bit over-enthusiastic, but in models like the Liberty, the four-speed automatic was a sound unit. When test driving the vehicle, make sure there are no thumps or vibrations when the gearbox shifts down, and try to shift gears manually. The gearbox should respond instantly to manual input, without any hesitation or noise.

The experience over the decades has been that the more you do to make a car secure, the more damage the bad guys will do to it in the name of gaining access. Making the door locks harder to remove will lead to the crooks using a bigger screwdriver to pop the locks out, or simply lead them to smash a window if they really want to get inside. When cars were easy to steal without the key, many did, in fact, disappear overnight. But now the coded ignition key is required, many car thefts now begin with an aggravated burglary so the thieves can get hold of that key, terrorising the owners in the process. It's a sad truth, but a truth nonetheless.

The best advice is to park the car somewhere secure or at least under a light source (a street light can make all the difference). And, of course, never leave anything you value inside the car. That's not always easy, but, again, it's a fact of life.

Not sure where you heard or read that. Stuart, but it’s not even close to being true. Australia will get the 2021 Subaru Levorg, but the nuances of global supply from the Japanese factory mean that it might not show up in local showrooms until the fourth quarter of this year.

What precise form it will take is still a matter of great conjecture, but the smart money seems to think that it will be a muscled-up Levorg this time around. It will definitely have a turbocharged petrol engine and, again, the rumours suggest it might use the new 2.4-litre engine from the WRX, perhaps with a slightly different tune. A hybrid or plug-in electric Levorg? Not this time around, it would seem, and Subaru will probably wait until the next platform upgrade before it introduces electric-drive technology to the Levorg range.