By Steven Symes 
A Subaru dealer in Massachusetts spilled the beans that the Japanese automaker plans on hiking prices on different models by as much as $2,500, supposedly because of tariffs. At least that’s how industry publication CBT News has framed the situation.
Toyota’s CEO wants to see more fun cars on the road.
According to the report, The Subaru BRZ and WRX, which are both built in Japan, will see a $2,000 price increase. The Ascent will see increases between $1,085 and $2,055 and the Forester will experience a jump of $1,075 to $1,600.
The Outback will get hit with a $1,820 increase, but the Impreza and Crosstrek will only see a $750 spike.
What gets us is car prices have inflated out of control over the past ten years, especially the last five, and the media barely covered it. But now that Trump has imposed tariffs, every last price increase is being attributed to that.
Is it possible at least some if not all of these price increases are due to the tariffs? Sure. Subaru won’t comment on it and we only know about the higher prices thanks to a lone dealer which forked over the information to CBT News.
Let’s just put things into perspective. Long before tariffs were a factor, the 2015 Subaru Outback had a base MSRP of about $25,000. For the 2020 model year it was $26,645. For 2025 it’s about $29,000.
That’s one of the more reasonable price increase examples we’ve pulled recently, but it still shows that the cost of new vehicles has been marching up for years and the media has barely covered it. But now there’s wall-to-wall coverage on Trump’s tariffs and all the economic damage we’re told they’ll do.
We don’t know what the end result of the tariffs will be and we don’t know if Trump’s policies are all good or not. What we do know is hyper-focusing on one factor that affects prices and ignoring everything else gives a skewed perspective on what’s going on in the market.
It’s almost like some in the media want to convince everyone cars were cheap before Trump came back into office. That’s not even remotely accurate. We’d love to see new vehicle prices come down, but they seem to keep increasing, making us wonder what the inevitable conclusion of this will be.
Image via Subaru
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