While the Ford Kuga gets all the attention for rocking up fashionably late at the SUV crossover party, the poor Forester seems to have blundered far, far from any kind of trendiness. What a turnaround.

The Mk1 Forester was well ahead of the curve, back in 1997. It was pretty much the originator of the soft-roader genre. Since then, this one-off has spawned a rampant contagion - not just Ford but Renault, Volvo, Mercedes and Saab will launch the things this year.

But as the Kuga shows, the thing to do in '08 is to dress in swoopy, flashy body panels. Instead, the Forester is bulkier and boxier than ever, in an inexplicable attempt to mimic old-style SUVs - vehicles now deeply unfashionable. Oops.

Climb inside, and you meet a jumble of well-assembled but mismatched, hard-surfaced dash plastics that would have been quite good in a supermini 10 years ago, but are distinctly yesterday in today's 'premium crossover'. And then you start up the engine. Petrol? But dahlink, hasn't just everyone gone diesel in their crossovers now?

That, though, is the joy of dealing with Subaru: it's a company that doesn't give a stuff about fashion. It doesn't really do marketing, and the design department is small and meek and always getting knocked back by the guys who really rule the roost, the engineers.

If it's a question of finding the budget for a soft-feel dash or a better kind of bearing in the centre diff, it's the diff that'll win out every time. Remember, the corporate notepaper still says Fuji Heavy Industries. A no-nonsense name for a proper, no-nonsense Japanese car company.

So the Forester goes about its business with utter conviction and sincerity. Only a boxer engine is good enough, because it's short front-to-rear and low top-to-bottom. So the centre of gravity is low (perfect when on the road) yet the ground clearance is high (perfectoff it).

The crankshaft runs fore-aft rather than transversely, which makes the AWD transmission straightforward and light. Subaru has clung to this layout for yonks. It's expensive, but it works.

In the whole wide world, there's only one other car company as stubborn, and it happens to use the same layout, albeit with two more cylinders and travelling in the opposite direction. Yes, think of a Forester as a 911 Carrera 4 going backwards and you won't be far wrong.

All of which means this thing has the road manners to make other crossovers feel a league off the pace. The others are either stiff to make them handle, so they ride like carts - see the X3 and Tiguan. Or they're soft in search of comfort, but corner like galleons. In some cases, they neither ride nor handle. But the Forester deals with bumps really sweetly, yet still likes a bend or two.

It rolls and pitches a bit, but in a progressive kind of way, and is happy for you to enjoy the traction. All that lets it down is the power steering, a new fully electric system with too little feel.

Unfortunately, Subaru can sometimes be tripped up by its corporate uniqueness and smallness. When Europe started to go mad for diesels 10 years ago, insular little Subaru wouldn't - couldn't afford to actually - jump on the bandwagon.