Thanks for this place to vent. I bought the car I always wanted, a Subaru, how great is that!! I bought it with 30,000 miles on it and thought it was great until it started acting strange when starting and stopping, jerks and slips. I thought this would be my last car I bought, but boy was I wrong, this is a pos! Really don't know what to do, bought it from car max with max care warranty which is a pos too. Will try to go to dealer to get some help. Any advice would be greatly helpful.

Update from Jun 9, 2018: well here we go again, I went to the dealer and they took to for a 8 mile test drive, they said it was what a cvt does, and it was normal for it to do that. So it was not fixed, it still jerks like it's running out of gas, and rocks back and forth when I put in park. So if this is normal for a cvt why would anyone buy one, and why would subaru extend the warranty to 100,000 miles. I guess I have to go further to see if anyone will listen to me so I can get it fixed. I think I might need to trade it for a rav 4

My wife & I purchased a new Forester in summer of 2014. Immediately we experienced severe jumping and bucking between 5 - 30 mph, a condition that is horribly bad when the engine is cold, but is still bad when the motor is hot.

We took it back to dealer (Terry Subaru, Lynchburg, VA) about 2 weeks after purchase leaving it overnight. They said they found nothing and said there were no Subaru software updates to correct such a problem. I returned this Forester to dealer two more times over the period of three months complaining about the obnoxious jumping/bucking problem and asking them to seek help from the manufacturer . They said that there was nothing they or the district Subaru representative could do. The Service Manager told my wife and me that all Foresters handled and performed the same was as ours (which we did not believe). There was no serious attempt to acknowledge or correct this unbelievably severe problem.

Every day for 2 years, we have had to live with this terrible problem. We have driven and are still driving this Subaru Forester with a defective transmission without any help from the dealer or the manufacturer. Making matters even worse, we are 80 years of age and both partially disabled. As a retired mechanical engineer, it is obvious there is a problem with the CVT. There must be slack in the drive belt/chain when it is on the low speed end of the cones, a manufacturing defect. I have owned or leased 19 new vehicles in my lifetime and never had one that jumped & bucked except my first car, a 1953 Plymouth sedan with a 3-speed manual transmission which bucked the same way as the Forester at 10 mph in high gear going uphill.

This 2014 Subaru Forester is the mechanically worst car I have ever owned or leased. My wife & I feel like orphans based on the lack of help from the dealer or the manufacturer regarding this 19th century problem in a 21st century vehicle. Disgusted.

Have owned new Forester for 3 months, now at 2200 miles. The vehicle jumps, bucks, lurches continually between 15 and 35 mph. Worse at 23 mph. Dealer says it's the CVT and that all the other new Foresters on the lot have the same problem. Dealer says Subaru does not acknowledge the problem but could probably solve the problem with a software fix if they would acknowledge that it exists in many of its vehicles.

I was never made aware of this problem when I bought the vehicle. I bought it for my sick (Parkinson's) 78 year old wife as her last new car. Had I known that the Forrester had this substandard performance design flaw in its transmission, I would have never purchased it.

The Uniform Commercial Code in the U. S. provides an implied warranty for ANY PRODUCT SOLD which does not live up to the normal standard of other such products sold by its competitors. Customers purchasing new vehicles expect them to have smooth transmissions and almost all do except Subaru's with CVT transmissions.

MY STRONG RECOMMENDATION IS THAT YOU NOT PURCHASE A SUBARU FORESTER WITH A CVT TRANSMISSION. THE JUMPING, BUCKING AND LURCHING IS BOTH DISTRACTING AND DANGEROUS.