All of those have been discussed here . I'd recommend a Search. The car is solid, and that engine is the same one they put in many other models. The 2.4T is in a mild state of tune, I'll be surprised if they don't last a long time if left stock.

 

Mild state of tune is misleading.

It's a small displacement high output engine. They come with their own set of concerns. In general the fa24 has been showing pretty reasonable signs of being reliable although the engine is still quite new to market. The issues with the outgoing fa20f took some years to identify solidly

 

Reliability and power handling are not the same thing.

Reliability can be quantified by several metrics. Here are the most common metrics:

• Mean Time before Failure (MTBF), plotted with standard deviation
• Median cost of failure (including standard deviations)
• 3 year cumulative cost of ownership

The population size and length of time since introduction are important for good metrics. The FA24 hasn't been around very long and so we are only starting to learn about the long-term reliability.

Once again, power handling and reliability are NOT the same thing. Reliability generally assumes the vehicle is stock with OEM parts.

 

Its Schrodinger's engine right now. Will it be amazing? Will it be a flaming turd?

Yes!

 

I suspect you'd be hard pressed to provide me evidence of a truly "unreliable" engine produced in the last 15 years.

The question these days is... is the engine capable of surviving the abuse and neglect of the owner?

 

And also is the vehicle worth fixing if the engine is good but the rest of the car is falling apart or not worth the cost of repair.

 

Sometimes I wish I had more money than brains. I’m working on it slowly.

 

Not sure exactly why they have issues
50% driver
50% manufacturer

 

You can't just use 1 case for an example to say a motor is bad/unreliable, lol. My fa24 doesn't burn any oil, as I'm sure most on here dont. There's alot of important information missing like, was he tuned? Was it tuned properly? Did he ever try to get it looked at under warranty for burning so much oil? Was he using the right oil? Did he run it too low on oil since it was burning so much of it, Etc. Etc....

 

FA24 is a far more modern engine, with lessons learned from the FA20. The march of progress is more turbid for small manufacturers like Subaru. Expect problems and solutions for all 3 engines.

The EJ engine block would have been designed when an i386 was running the FEA.

 

Thinking on it I bet there are volumes of hand drawn technical drawings for them in a file cabinet over there.