Subaru Australia says the Outback is still a wagon and not an SUV, hopping into a furious international debate about whether the seventh-generation model deserves the title.
Family Cars
Despite major changes to its size, shape and style, Subaru Australia insists the new-generation Outback is still a wagon, not an SUV.
The brand launched the 2026 Subaru Outback in recent weeks, with the new model more SUV-like than before, featuring a boxier, taller, and heavier design.
There has been much debate internationally over what the seventh-generation Outback should be classified as, but Subaru Australia’s General Manager, Scott Lawrence, told local media it is definitely still a wagon.
“Thirty years ago this year, Subaru launched something truly different – a raised all-wheel-drive wagon at a time when wagons were soft, and four-wheel-drives were uncompromisingly hard,” he said.
“With the launch of the Outback in 1996, Subaru effectively created that crossover category before it existed. Redefining what Australians can get out of their SUV family car.
“And while the world has changed a fair bit since then, it's fair to say one thing hasn't. Australians still want more out of their vehicle. They want substance. They don't just want to look the part, [they want] vehicles that deliver confidence when the road turns rough.
“Outback has been and will remain our greatest all-terrain wagon.”
The Subaru Outback started out life as a cladded and lifted version of the Legacy wagon, although it soon gained enough popularity to eclipse it.
However, with each new generation, it has become taller and more SUV-like, with the 2026 model so different that many customers say they won’t buy it.
News outlet CarBuzz quotes Aaron Cole, Manager of Product Communications for Subaru of America, saying customers in the US wanted the Outback to morph into an SUV.
"We conducted focus group testing…Our customers were very clear that they liked the wagon's utility, including ingress and egress, cargo capacity, and more. They indicated they did not want the dimensions to change, though they said more cargo room would always be helpful,” he told the publication.
In fairness, in the comments section, as Drive has seen from our own reader feedback, most complaints about the MY26 Outback are about its new looks rather than which category it falls into.
One commenter said, “It’s the Griswold family truckster.” While another added, “It looks like a truck-based SUV, like a GMC, barely like a Subaru.” Others just simply called it “hideous”.
According to CarBuzz, Subaru quietly stopped officially referring to the Outback as a wagon around the 2020 model year, while Subaru Australia was happy to straddle the divide by describing it as both an SUV and a wagon at the same time.
Meanwhile, Car and Driver has sought to define what makes a wagon in a more scientific way.
It believes wagons have a length 2.6 times the width and a width 1.3 times the height, which the new Outback is not.
“Its length is 2.5 times its width, and its width is 1.1 times its height. In other words, it's too tall to be a wagon,” it reported in April last year.
Whatever it may be, Robert Choon, Product Manager at Subaru Australia, said the Outback is still a capable off-road vehicle for adventure-oriented families.
“The silhouette may have changed over the years to the current generation, but certainly the intent of the Outback still remains,” he said.
Wagon sales have dropped sharply in recent years, with just 3368 new examples of the body type sold in 2024, down 33 per cent on 2023.
In 2024, it recorded 10,227 deliveries, and 8384 in 2025, a fall of 18 per cent.
There are still some wagons available in Australia in 2026, including the Skoda Octavia and Superb, as well as BMW’s Touring and Audi’s Avant models.
Other options include the Cupra Leon Sportstourer, which arrived locally late last year.
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A born-and-bred newshound, Kathryn has worked her way up through the ranks reporting for, and later editing, two renowned UK regional newspapers and websites, before moving on to join the digital newsdesk of one of the world’s most popular newspapers – The Sun. More recently, she’s done a short stint in PR in the not-for-profit sector, and led the news team at Wheels Media.
