i am reporting on behalf of my mother and am looking for some comparative stories, of which there seem to be a few.

She bought this 20002 subaru Impreza about 1 year ago. At 1250000 km, it was apparent that there was a clutch problem and she had it replaced 8000 km ago. I have driven this occasionally and found the clutch to be slipping something fierce. I decided to take it in for her, assuming warranty. Dealership warned me that their inspection would be the decider of that.

they just finished the test drive and "take the transmission out" inspection to determine that this was caused by driver error. !!!!! Now, my mom has driven standards for a good portion of her life and knows at least not to ride the clutch. her second last car was a VW passat that she had for years without clutch woes whatsoever. i am confident that she knows how to drive it.

Dealership stated that they would replace under a begrudging "goodwill" policy, but were urging me to come and see the damage. I don't doubt it. I believe that mom will be subject to a driving habits interview.

I on the other hand, returned to the service guy with my assertion that it was an installation problem. she should have had the car back in the first couple of weeks of replacement, but since her first experience with the car was a bad clutch, she had no reference against which to measure the driveability and probably just let the thing go too long, not knowing how it should behave.

if anyone has any experience with bad installations leading to clutch failures, I'd love to hear about it.