Please also refer to same problem posted by Janice L on 03-01-16....her description on same type of vehicle matches our problem exactly!

After two Toyota RAV 4's in a row, my wife and I decided to try a "Top Rated" Subaru Forester. My wife is a traveling nurse in a rural area and puts a lot of mileage on her vehicle. The Subaru performed great on dry and wet road conditions. We live in an area that can have winter driving conditions from November through the end of May. As I did with the RAV's, I put the top rated snow tires on her car in November.

First slick roads-Wife advised that she was not sure what was going with her Forester. She said it "drives like its on balloons". Anything over 35-40 miles an hour she felt like she was going to lose control and go off the road. She also said that other vehicles, including pickup trucks were passing her on the same road conditions. I drove the Subaru under the same conditions. WOW...scared the heck out of myself. The wife described it perfectly!

The dealer thought it was the tires. The tire shop manager thought it was the car, adding that his wife had a Subaru and it did the same thing. He suggested we have the car alignment checked. Dealer checked the alignment and found it was way out of alignment. This seemed strange because my wife had not impacted anything to cause the car to go out of alignment. Once the car was aligned, we thought the issue improved for a short time. However, less than two weeks after the car was aligned, I was driving the car on slick roads and had to fight to keep it on the road at less than 40 mph.

This problem continued until my wife soon had no confidence with the car on slick roads. We traded it back on a Toyota RAV 4.

Bill L. Colorado

Fishtailing on Ohio Turnpike! It was 63 & sunny when we left DC, & nice all the way thru beautiful Pennsylvania, but at some point on the Ohio Turnpike we got hit with rain – not a big deal, just tiresome to drive in, so eventually I took over the driving to give my husband a break, thinking we had 2 hrs left before we got to our hotel in Elkhart, IN.

Then the rain turned to snow & the temps dropped to the 20’s…now you would think that a Subaru with MN plates would be able to handle that, but our car started fishtailing whenever I’d go over 40mph, even though all the other cars/trucks (semis, SUVs, small cars) were driving at least 60 & passing us w/o problems. I felt like I couldn't control the vehicle.

I put the hazard lights on & just crawled along at about 40mph, stopping once to add air to the tires to see if that helped. It didn’t. My knuckles were definitely white & tired after driving for over an hour like that but going only about 40 miles; and each time a semi passed us, I tensed up a lot because I was so worried that the fishtailing would go majorly out of control. No one was going as slow as we were, until we neared Angola, Indiana, where the snow/ice/wind apparently worsened & other drivers slowed down, too.

We ended up canceling our hotel reservation because it was still 80 miles away so we stopped in Angola instead (lost money on the hotel cancellation but at that point I was willing to throw in the towel as I seriously wasn’t sure if we would survive if we stayed on the road). I was really scared because it felt like I had so little control of the car, which was a freaky feeling. It felt like rear-wheel drive instead of AWD. If you read Subaru's ads about the disadvantage of not having AWD, that description fit our experience only worse. This was entirely unexpected because "it's a Subaru!" so we expected superior handling in these conditions.

After we were safe in the hotel, I read about some fishtailing issues with other Subaru models, & it sounded like on dry roads, these cars were fine. This was a problem reported only on snowy roads. The next morning we had dry roads & had no problems going 70. As a precaution, we had the car checked by the nearest dealer (an hour from our hotel), & they couldn't find anything wrong with it except the alignment was off a little. So they realigned the car & we drove back to MN at freeway speeds, on dry roads the rest of the way so no problem. After we got home, I called the national Subaru number & they looked into this issue but couldn't find any other reason for it either.

The problem is that we don't know if the issue is resolved or not, as it apparently would only occur on snowy/icy highways and we're in spring weather now. I am very reluctant to take a chance on driving it in those conditions again. This is our 2nd Forester and we were quite satisfied with our 2003 model so that's what prompted us to go with a Subaru again, but this car has been a very bumpy ride from the get-go, though it has previously handled snow/ice just fine. I definitely felt like we might not make it home alive when fishtailing on the turnpike.