Hello to everyone,
A few times people have recommended things to me on the board and also asked me about things from the pictures I’ve posted, so I thought I’d start a thread about small modifications and accessories you can do to your Outback. Here is a small list of things I did to get started. Post yours!
Replaced the mirror / “beauty” lights with these LEDs. They are now ULTRA bright, almost too bright – at night they are blindingly bright. Let’s see what my wife has to say See photo below of stock (left) vs. LED (right).
See attachment 473703
Replaced the tail light with this LED. It’s very bright in comparison, and at night it’s quite bright — easily lighting up the entire lid. Very nice and recommended.
See attachment 473704
Our kids constantly kick the back of our seats and get them dirty, so we put these seat protectors on the driver and passenger seats. Now there are no more scratches and dirt/mud on the back of our seats, and these are easy to clean.
Subaru has an OEM cargo basket, but it’s somewhat low quality and doesn’t fold as nicely as some of the aftermarket types. We bought this one, which is really nice – you can use one half and fold the other half, or open both halves. It has a non-slip, non-slip bottom on the back of our Outback (we have the OEM all-weather mat in there). We keep a change of baby clothes in it, a blanket and a compact car vacuum cleaner.
And speaking of compact car wipers, I took a chance on this despite the warning that it doesn’t work on Subarus (several reviews said it did). Works great on our 2020 Touring XT — I tried the glove box outlet as well as the one in the trunk. It’s really compact, comes with a carrying case and has a lot of suction. Totally recommended – just used it this afternoon to remove a lot of autumn leaves that have tracked into the car.
Something that bugs us about the car is when you connect two smartphones to the front USB ports, they fight over which one owns the Android Auto connection. It’s pretty annoying. The way to prevent it is to use a data lock cable that only has charging capabilities. We took a few of them and put them in the glove box so we can be sure that when we just want to charge, that’s all that happens.
And finally, we put a Bump Shox Max license plate frame on our car to provide some protection when parking on the street — it helps when cars use your bumper to navigate a spot while parallel parking. It doesn’t protect against everything, but it does a good job against a good portion of it. See below.
See attachment 473711