I have to admit that I was grouchy almost from the get-go with this particular test car.

It had the hardest shift between first and second in an automatic that I've ever felt in my life. And while it's probably fixable, it annoyed the dickens out of me, and I'm thinking of suing Subaru for whiplash.

Putting that aside, this is the car to get if you need a practical all-wheel-drive sedan that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. It really fills a niche. No one else makes one like it. The next cheapest AWD sedan is the Audi A4, which is about $10,000 more than the Legacy.

Because of the AWD, it tracks very well. When you turn, it goes. And it really holds the road. It's got a pretty good reliability record, from what we've seen. But I found the ride stiff, and the seat too close to the floor and not terribly comfortable.

And, now, I admit, I'm picking on this car because of that gol' durn shifting problem, but the other thing I hated is that the windows take forever to go down. If you do more than one window at a time, it takes three times as long to go down, which made tollbooths particularly annoying...not to mention the shift between first and second when we pulled away from the tollbooth. Did I forget to mention that?

View cars.com model report on this vehicle.

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