The latest-generation Subaru WRX may not be as universally beloved as its predecessors, but there are plenty of reasons to get behind the wheel of the more “mature” sports sedan. For starters, the WRX is one of the most stubborn manual transmission holdouts in the U.S., still offering a stick shift in base configuration rather than making buyers pay extra for the pleasure of rowing their own gears. And we can add another tactile pleasure to the experience, because Subaru will install a delightfully weird CD player to your new WRX under the armrest of the center console.
It costs extra, of course, but you can’t really put a price on nostalgia and the flood of dopamine that comes with wrestling a crinkly wrapper off a new CD. Subaru will nevertheless charge $375 plus installation for the WRX “CD Player Kit,” which requires feeding the disc downwards, or vertically, instead of like with the horizontal slot-loading drives that used to be so common on new cars.
Subaru
Strangely, the optional kit is $75 more expensive if it’s going into an automatic—sorry, Subaru Performance Transmission-equipped—WRX. Perhaps the CVT’s shifter makes installation a little more of a pain. Whatever the reason, it’s amusing that it’s a bit cheaper to pair the retro playback solution with the retro powertrain.
Subaru’s CD player basically looks like an old PC’s optical drive, but I have to respect the company’s commitment to the format. $375 to $450 seems steep for such a basic device. but it’s not a lot of money given that adding a CD player later could be too costly or complicated to be worth it. Owners of new cars have nearly zero incentive to change their vehicle’s CarPlay- and Android Auto-centric infotainment systems, unless a head unit breaks. You could argue that the lack of a CD player actually makes a car’s media system more reliable, since there are less moving parts.
Still, some of us continue to buy CDs to listen on old (and new) decks, or to rip and add them to our music libraries and portable players. (Hey—Sony still makes the Walkman despite the great migration of music to the cloud.) Others buy CDs to support a particular album or artist, or to simply avoid streaming services and endless subsciptions. CDs’ superior sound quality is just icing on the very thin cake. Vinyl records have lately been outselling discs in America, as The Verge reports, but the humble CD isn’t far behind the format in many markets around the world. Japan is reportedly one of them, which could explain why Subaru has kept the WRX’s CD player alive all these years.
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