• Decent space for four adults
• Square, flat boot floor
• Lots of safety tech

How much space is there?

The Solterra isn’t exactly a small car, being marginally longer than the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Skoda Enyaq. But its fastback coupe-ish (or hatchback-ish, if you prefer) shape and relatively shallow body means there’s less space than those cars offer.

Back seat headroom and leg/kneeroom is pretty generous for my five-foot-ten frame, but really quite tight for anyone over six feet tall. Space is similarly ample for children but watch your head on the sloping roofline when you bend down into the car to help little ones in and out. Accommodation is much more generous up front, whatever size you are.

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Boot space and storage

The Solterra’s boot is a quite a long, wide and flat space but rather shallow. The 452-litre capacity looks pretty paltry in comparison to the Ioniq 5’s 527 litres and Enyaq’s 585 litres. The figure drops to 441 litres in the top-grade Touring model, the upgraded stereo’s subwoofer accounting for the loss. There is, at least, an extra space under the boot floor where you can store the charging cables. The back seats fold down, but Subaru doesn’t quote the load capacity in that configuration.

Curiously, there’s no glovebox. Apparently, it helps create more space for the front seat passenger, though there’s not a vast amount of cabin storage as a result. The door bins are a good size and there’s a plinth underneath the centre console for phones and wallets, but not much else.

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Is it easy to park?

The Solterra is quite a big car, but it’s hardly massive so it slots easily into most supermarket and multi-storey parking spaces. It also has standard-fit front and rear parking sensors, reversing camera and a highly effective surround-view system that picks up out-of-sight obstacles.

And you very much need those systems because the view out of the back window and over the shoulder is really very poor. The angle of the back window creates a tiny letterbox to see through and it doesn’t have a wiper, either. It’s supposedly kept clear by the twin roof spoilers, but I dispute their efficacy. At least the view forward is pretty good, thanks to the wide windscreen and thin A-pillars.

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Safety

• Packed with safety features
• Some are a bit too keen to intervene
• Most are easily turned off

The Solterra is a very safe car, scoring an impressively high set of marks in Euro NCAP testing – identical to the Toyota bZ4X’s scores, incidentally. The single highest score was posted in the safety assist assessment, reflecting the Solterra’s comprehensive Safety Sense suite of driver assistance systems. They include:

• Adaptive cruise control
• Lane departure warning
• Lane tracing assist
• Blind spot monitoring
• Road sign assist
• Rear cross-traffic alert
• Driver attention monitor
• Emergency steering assist

In use, I found the driver attention monitor and speed limit warning are a bit too keen, often giving erroneous warnings. Likewise, the lane departure warning, which can be rather abrupt in its corrections. Many drivers may well prefer to just turn these systems off (not difficult to do) which defeats the object, really.

Good news for families, though, is the pair of Isofix child seat mounts on the outer rear seats.

Watch: Subaru Solterra Euro NCAP crash test video