No recall at all on this year — but a third of its complaint file is windshields cracking for no reason, and nothing covers that.

The second real thread. Owners report the whole driver-assist suite shutting down together — 'All the advanced driver assistance system items listed on the website list all shutdown. The emergency brake lamp also was lighted' — with the fault clearing and returning within a day and the dealer unable to solve it. Others report the opposite failure: the car braking hard on its own with nothing in front of it, once into low sun at 35 mph. One owner reports a dealer running seven failed EyeSight recalibration sequences and releasing the car anyway. And one complaint traces a total loss of EyeSight, all-wheel drive and power-steering assist to a blocked air-conditioning drain soaking the electronics under the front seats. Two things to do: exercise adaptive cruise and lane centring properly on the test drive, and check the carpets under the front seats for damp, which is a cheap fix that prevents an expensive one.

Three owners in this year's file describe the car accelerating without input. One, turning into a parking space at 20 mph with the brake pressed, hit a concrete wall; the airbags did not deploy and the driver was injured. Another describes the engine roaring on startup, then the car surging forward into a tree with the brake pedal and steering unresponsive, the car written off. A third reports the car accelerating from a slow stop. We are reporting only what owners filed with NHTSA: there is no recall, no manufacturer campaign, and no federal investigation we retrieved. A first-generation review notes a separate unintended-acceleration class action filed in 2020 in the District of New Jersey and is careful to say the Crosstrek is not named in it; we flag that as unverified and do not rely on it. Test what you can: confirm the brake pedal is firm with normal travel, and pay close attention moving off from a stop.

This is the only Crosstrek year here with an empty recall list, and it is worth explaining because an empty result from NHTSA can mean 'no campaigns' or 'wrong model name'. We enumerated the 2023 Subaru catalog and confirmed CROSSTREK is the name it uses. We then ran the identical query against the 2023 Forester, the 2022 Impreza and the 2021 Crosstrek in the same session and got live campaigns back from all three, proving the query itself works. Finally we checked the scope of every Subaru campaign of this era against this car: the front driveshaft recall 23V754 names the 2024 Crosstrek, not the 2023; the inhibitor-switch recall 23V755 names the 2021 Crosstrek; the windshield-bonding recall 22V712 names the Impreza and Outback only; and the plug-in hybrid terminal recall 23V080 stops at the 2022 model year. So the zero holds as of 31 July 2026. It is not a promise about the future — recalls are issued years after the fact on these cars, as 23V755 was in late 2023 for 2021 vehicles — so check the VIN yourself before you buy.

The telematics parasitic drain that runs through this whole generation reaches the last year too: an owner reports replacing the battery three times and believing the car has the parasitic-drain problem. Beyond that the file holds a scattering of items rather than a pattern — a valve-cover gasket and spark-plug seal failure, rear struts breaking at 38,000 miles on a car never taken off pavement, a power brake booster declared defective at 46,000 miles, rear brakes dragging, a sunroof shattering at highway speed. None of these has a campaign or a bulletin behind it and none appears more than once. Worth an inspection on a lift; not worth walking away over.

Both of the Subaru stories a shopper arrives with are simply the wrong era for this car. The oil-consumption powertrain warranty extension to 8 years/100,000 miles and its class-action settlement cover model years 2012 to 2015 only, eight years before this car, and the 2014 to 2015 portion was manual-transmission cars only. We searched every 2016 through 2023 Crosstrek complaint payload for oil-consumption language and found no matches at all. The head gasket belongs to Subaru's older EJ-series engine; a mechanic who pulled an EJ engine for exactly that repair says on camera that by the time the FB engine arrived around 2015 the problem was gone, and reports no oil consumption on his own FB car at 72,000 miles. Judge a 2023 on its glass, its driver-assist behaviour and its service history.