Battery OEM Honda or OEM Subaru

I’m in the UAE, where summers hit around 50°C. This Forester is my first car with auto start-stop, and I’m impressed that the battery lasted a solid 4 years. With my driving habits (lots of short runs), my previous cars’ batteries would barely survive 1–1.5 years. This one lasted more than double that.

Still on vanilla battery. As part of my wife's start process is start car, press button to turn off auto off. Seems to be working.

Our car straight up died on the road twice, to the point it couldn't be jumped, with my kids in the back seat. Subaru eventually gave us an upgraded battery.

Of course, you can get a new battery, and I recently had a new battery 80% covered by the dealer, since this is a very well known and documented problem. (My battery was going on 6 years old, so I felt like the discount made it a good time to replace it anyways. The discount was specifically because it is a known issue, and supposedly the new battery is more powerful and “solves” the problem, per the dealer.)

OEM Subaru batteries and not the best. When it's time for replacement go with a 3rd party battery.

I had this issue as well, one day the car wouldn’t turn over. Then it would. Then there was no power. Then it would start. Over several days and weeks this would happen. It was explained to me that the Subaru batteries that come from the factory are made to hold just barely enough power to start the car. If that power is diminished in even the slightest degree, like with normal usage in the first 50k miles, then the battery does not have enough charge to do its basic task anymore, rendering it useless. As I understood it, the batteries in the new cars are not up to snuff.

Replacing my battery recently

A new battery at 10k miles.

Battery died around 50k miles.

My 2020 Outback OEM battery only lasted 3-ish years.