Why your Subaru Legacy is losing power on hills
I have always wanted to own a Subaru, and recently bought an old BH5 Legacy from a friend. I’ve known him for a while and been a passenger in his car several times, so I did not have the car pre-checked. I now discover it is slow in “picking” and shifting gears, especially on hills. This did not improve after service and changing the CVT. What could be the cause and remedy?
Patrick
In any all-around power loss without any other specific symptom such as heavy smoke from the exhaust, the probability is that the engine is not getting enough fuel and perhaps the airflow from intake to exhaust tailpipe is restricted.
Fuel starvation suggests a problem with a weak fuel pump, or clogged fuel filters, or dirty fuel injectors. Restricted airflow could be due to a choked air filter, a clogged catalyzer, collapsed debris in the silencer, or simply a squashed exhaust pipe after driving over a bank or boulder.
Identify the culprit by a process of elimination, starting with those that can be visually checked. A cursory service might have missed the squashed pipe and probably only changed the under-bonnet filters; there will be others.
None of these condemns your purchase as a bad deal, all can be readily rectified once identified. None are unusual for an old Legacy. If there are other symptoms, the list of possible causes gets bigger…and so might the cost of remedy, and you might get a sharp example of what buying a pig in a poke means.
Most of us will have done that at some time. I once bought an old Peugeot 504 from an elderly relative. He had a driver and rarely went far or fast, and would have been very diligent with regular service by the main agents. The car had lots of years, but had very few kilometres and was likely to be in great shape.
However, it was in shocking mechanical condition, and when I dug deep to assess the fixes, I discovered that numerous supposedly good-as-new components had been swapped for junk.
Even the twin-choke 504 carburettor looked very like a single-choke option from a 404 pick-up. I didn’t have the money to fix it, so I used it to go racing on the Embakasi circuit (it didn’t go fast enough to require much skill) and then stripped it to do a recce of the entire Safari Rally route at practice pace. After that, even its original parts were junk, too.
