Is there a separate drive for your audio CDs if you want to listen to music or a book-on-tape or do you have to swap the disks when you ask the navigation system for point of interest information?ĥ. It seems that you have to put a navigation system CD into the disk drive to get route maps and information about points of interest, e.g., restaurants, etc. Does anybody have experience with this navigation system and can you compare it to any other in-car system or portable GPS?Ĥ.

The dealer said he had had special training but it still took us over an hour to figure out how to enter a destination. The user interface seemed extremely clunky and non-user-friendly. Again, the dealer didn't know and I didn't see anything in the manual.ģ. Does the navigation system accept voice commands? Given you can't alter destinations using the touch screen interface without stopping the car, this seems pretty important. Did we miss something or does the Impreza/Forester navigation system not speak street names?Ģ. We searched through all the settings as well as the instruction manual but couldn't find anything about this.ġ. I have a several year old Garmin nuvi 350 that speaks street names so I was surprised that a 2008 system wouldn't have this capability (TTS or text to speech). On our test drive, the voice announced turns in terms of distance rather than using street names, i.e., 'turn right in 500 feet,' instead of 'turn right on Smith St.' This seemed quite primitive to me. My local dealer didn't have a Forester with navigation in stock so took me for a ride in a 2008 Impreza which he said had the same navigation system. Some of the reviews I read of the car were negative on the navigation system but very vague about what was wrong with it.

I am looking at a 2009 Forester 2.5 Limited w/navigation system.

Subaru navigation system review 2016