Posted on 04/17/2025 8:27:26 AM PDT by Red Badger
These days, there’s an app for just about anything. But if you ask anybody who has tried to use a smartphone to measure something accurately, they’ll tell you it’s often a fool’s errand. When it comes to precision, it’s hard to beat an old-fashioned, easily verifiable physical implement such as a tape measure, a yardstick, or a 2026 Subaru Outback. What, you don’t measure things with your car? What are you even doing here?
Believe it or not, this convenience comes in the form of a taillight. For 2026, the design of the Subaru Outback’s rear lighting signature incorporates a ruler. It’s more than two feet long and admittedly slightly less convenient than an actual tape measure, but it’s certainly better than some of the alternatives we can think of. Given the choice between a scale banana and a taillight with an actual ruler in it, the taillight seems far more practical. Plus, you won’t be tempted to eat it. In fact, everybody’s lawyers would prefer that you go out of your way not to do that.
Besides, working up an appetite just might lead to one of the ruler’s most obvious cases: measuring fish. Whether you’re trying to make sure you’re legal or just looking to document your catch for the body of your dating profile, Subaru’s got you covered. After all, what could possibly one-up a picture of a dead fish better than a lengthy and detailed accounting of its dimensions? Go get ’em, stud.
Subaru has made a habit of incorporating quite a few interior and exterior Easter eggs over the years, most of which offered little to nothing in the way of real-world usefulness. Hey, if you can use the 2026 Outback as a ruler, who’s to say you can’t use a 2025 Forester as a map? Admittedly, the geographical scope is quite limited, but the shortest route to being proven wrong on the Internet is assuming that something hasn’t been done before.
We’ll make just one request: If you’re going to use your Outback to keep tabs on the dimensions of dead animals, give the tailgate a good wash when you’re done. Nobody wants to park next to a Subaru with a serious case of swamp ass.
And remember, please don’t eat the delicious taillights.
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Excuse me while I whip this out.
Why would a lesbian need a two foot ruler?
To measure the size of her dinner plate.
Overweight and obesity in lesbian and bisexual college women
Dumb article that fails to mention what the increments are. Not much use if the gradations are 14/19ths of an inch - even for those with solid numbers skills.
Cutting firewood?
The damned things are rolling, nanny state, surveillance platforms.
A ruler built into a car’s tail lights - that’s a good start. But I can’t tell you how many times I wished my back bumper could weigh things.
Please get to work on that, Subaru. But none of those weird metric units. Ounces, pounds, and tons only.
Sticking with my 2017 3.6 Outback. This big tank-like wagon can run forever with maintenance and has horses under the hood that feel like rockets when needed. Also super safety sensors.
Alas, the 3.x liter is a sin, crime, and shame for many (idiots) .
Would be cool if U.S. pickup/suv makers went back to business basics listening to the customer/market demands and needs, not cowering from pseudo-scientific, millenial fever-dreams and globalist control freaks. Now that a lot of the money is off the table, pending more deranged divisions of lower court judges and lawfare firms, maybe Ford, GM, Stellantis might make a Maga Golden Age truck again. And get richer doing so.
Two kinds of nations. Those who use the metric system and those who have landed astronauts on the moon and returned them safely.
Kind of like a Rorschach Test.
“Dumb article that fails .....”
Me employer began leasing Outback’s for the sales team. (I’m in a different position and get a 4x4 F-150 which has everyone else jealous)
Yes, I mock them mercilessly but the Outback is really a practical and well made car.
The other day one of them and I were out to lunch. We both ordered the same thing and I said that the waiter better not find out we drove here in a Subaru.
I think it’s there to measure gullibility!
I suspect that they might be working on that which would explain why they have invented a new unit of measure.
One might suspect that those are centimeters but then the ruler part without the extended doodad on the ends would be 19.68 inches and even with the extra tacked back on wouldnt come to “over two feet”.
Its either nothing at all or someone thought they were clever by building the wavelength of cesium or something they consider “deep” into the vehicle.
Totally agree.
Unless he means the tail light in total is over two feet long, not the built in ruler as he suggests, then the ruler could be 50cm.
To measure the smug?
It’s Nothing at All...
Trying to scale it from the dimensions of the car, the closest fit is the smaller increments are 1 centimeter each, with the larger increments every 5 centimeters.
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