I have owned my Forester for about 4 years and in that time I have spent just about what I paid for the car in repairs.
One of the control arms broke when I was on the highway and just about caused me to roll the car. Not a lot of fun. Apparently it is a recall issue. And although I took it to the dealer for work three times and had them look for any potential problems none of them checked my control arms. This honestly almost cost me my life. Repairing this would have cost me about $3000 but after much waiting and B.S. Subaru covered it.

Outside of that I have replaced the entire air conditioning system ($1500) Timing belt, Break lines, and now the transmission is failing and is sitting in the shop waiting to get an estimate. If it is more than a few hundred bucks I am going to drive the thing off a cliff as fast as I can make the thing go.

I would not call this a reliable car. The other thing is that there are very few dealerships compared to the big three. This can make it tricky when getting service.

It is a tank and deals with foul weather extremely well. For this I love it. The roof racks work very well and for its age it looks good.

I seriously wish that I could share in the great reliability stories that people here share. At this point I am looking at other brands.