Subaru Tribeca | Shed of the Week
Four driven wheels, five auto gears, six flat cylinders, seven seats and, er, £800 VED for another Shed newbie
Another SOTW debutant this week with the first appearance of the challengingly styled Subaru Tribeca. Tribecas were built in Indiana, which as the brainier ones amongst you will know is not in India. To attach some bohemian appeal to it, the car was named after a Manhattan neighbourhood famed for its population of artists, actors, authors and other undesirables. Referencing its location between Canal Street and Broadway, TriBeCa was an abbreviation of Triangle Below Canal. If you were discussing Mrs Shed's personal geography it would of course be Triangle Above Canal, but that's another kettle of fish.
Our 2006 car is a first-year example of Subaru's poorly timed attempt to cash in on the all-wheel drive midsized SUV market. Despite being hamstrung by its reliance on engine displacement rather than turbocharging for its power, and then being booted in the metaphorical nuts by the global financial crash of 2008, the Tribeca somehow managed to limp on until 2014. Not many were sold in the UK in those eight years, so this is now a rare model, one website reckoning there are only a hundred or so registered cars left. As such the Tribeca's first SOTW appearance might also be its last. Shed could only find one other example on sale, a Cat S 100,000-miler with a £2,995 price tag, but other than that this is your only choice.
The Tribeca was available in two seating formats, with five perches in the SE5 or, a Subaru first, seven in the SE7. Our Shed is an SE7, which was also Subaru code for telling you that your children would have to stop growing once they reached the age of seven because there wouldn't be enough legroom for them after that in either of the two back rows.
The ad says the seven-seat Trib comfortably seats five passengers, which it might do if you moved the sliding second row back as far as it went and threw the back row into the skip, but not everyone will consider that level of legwork economically worthwhile in a £1,995 vehicle. Quite where you'd fit your luggage in the titchy space behind the last row was not clear. Whether the driver was any better off than the rest of his miserable luggageless brood was also debatable on account of the steering column not being height-adjustable.
The 3.0-litre flat-six petrol unit in this Subaru delivered 241hp, 219lb ft and a wonderfully unfashionable 23mpg. The 3.0 turned out to be the economy model, in fact, as it was upgraded in 2007 to a 3.6 with 256hp/247lb ft. The seven-seater was lardy at over 1,900kg. With only a hunty old five-speed automatic transmission connecting the engine to the wheels, pre-update cars needed the best part of 10 seconds to hit 62mph from rest. You might be able to squeeze a few more mpg out of it but there'll be no wiggle room on the max tax rating of £790 a year.
The ad says it's ULEZ compliant but one of Shed's various scraps of information printed off tinternet says it's Euro 4. Do your own research, but looking ahead to a glorious future there's a fair chance that you won't be able to drive it in any town bigger than Basildon without paying extra for the privilege.
UK-spec Tribecas were OK on the inside if you didn't care about having lots of shiny metal in your eyeline. They came with leather, electronically adjustable front seats, cruise, air con, sat nav, sunroof, a reversing camera and switchable traction control, but not a height-adjustable steering column. The pics are taken from quite far away and in dappled sunlight, sometimes with a wide angle lens to big up the useable space. That makes it harder than usual for Shed to spot any imperfections, but even he can see the dints on the rear bumper. He can also see a front end that puts him in mind of Ron Mael, the keyboard player out of Sparks. There's a ZA badge on the back so keep your nose peeled for any telltale whiffs of biltong.
Talking of bad smells, head gaskets are known for failing on these engines, leading to overheating and/or oil leaks. The transmission, rear suspension and power steering can also give trouble. The MOT history suggests that this 104,000-mile car might have already had its gaskets replaced because a leak that was noticed in 2024 had been sorted in time for the 2025 test. MOT testers spotted suspension wear and rust in those same two years, but this April they weren't able to notice anything whatsoever wrong with it, which is a sign of either lots of money having been spent on it - some kind of miracle - or something else that PH's lawyers won't let Shed talk about.
I have absolutely no words for this.
Mrs Shed triangle being above her canal and kettles of fish - that brings up all sorts of giggles and images lol
As an aside, why does shed only find sheds sold by dealers, surely private sellers must have sheds for sale within the pistonheads classifieds?
And the legroom isn't that bad. I've had 4 6ft adults and 3 10-12-y-o kids in it for short journeys (including 1 up a steep rutted farm track where it impressed everyone.)
And it's not bad to hustle down a b-road. And they sound good, particularly with a stainless exhaust.
But it's ugly, drinks fuel, the gearbox is beyond dim-witted and better used as an automated manual, it's ugly, pretty slow and mine had an intermittent misfire we couldn't get to the bottom of and the oil pump was leaking.
And it's pretty f
king ugly.But once you're in it you don't have to look at it. So that's nice!
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