The 2026 Subaru Ascent Touring still has a 3.5-millimeter auxiliary audio jack. Right there in the dash, sitting next to a USB-C and a USB-A port like a relic refusing to vacate its apartment.
It shouldn’t be newsworthy that a car has a hole you can plug a cable into. But here we are, in 2025, where the presence of a simple analog audio port in a new vehicle qualifies as a genuine surprise. The Drive’s Adam Ismail, who has been testing the three-row SUV for nearly a week, says he frankly cannot remember the last time he encountered one in a new car.
That’s because almost nobody puts them in anymore.
Subaru’s own newer models have already moved on. The refreshed Forester and Outback don’t offer one. The WRX skips it too, though Subaru will still sell you a top-loading CD player for the hot sedan’s center console — a $450 option also available on the Ascent.
The BRZ and Toyota GR86 technically still hide aux jacks inside their center consoles, and the aging Legacy retains one as well. But the Ascent is the oldest nameplate in Subaru’s current lineup, dating to 2018, and that vintage is doing the heavy lifting here.
Try Googling “cars with aux jacks” and the first result is a forum thread from 2007. That tells you everything about how thoroughly the auto industry has memory-holed this connector. It has gone the way of the cigarette lighter, the cassette deck, and the manual transmission — not because consumers demanded its removal, but because cost sheets and parts consolidation made the decision for them.
The 3.5-mm jack is a zero-subscription, zero-login, zero-algorithm interface. Plug in, press play, hear music. No pairing failures, no Bluetooth codec negotiations, no streaming service nudging you toward a playlist you never asked for.
That simplicity is precisely why it disappeared. There’s no recurring revenue in an analog port. No data collection, no ecosystem lock-in. It does one thing, it does it perfectly, and nobody can monetize it after the sale.
Subaru isn’t keeping the jack out of some noble stand for consumer choice. The Ascent simply hasn’t been redesigned since the late Trump and early Biden years, and nobody bothered to delete the port in its midcycle updates. When the replacement arrives — and it will, probably soon — the jack will almost certainly vanish.
What’s worth paying attention to is how quickly we’ve normalized the loss. A decade ago, every car on a dealer lot had an aux input. Now finding one is like spotting a payphone. The auto industry systematically stripped out a universally compatible, maintenance-free, driver-friendly feature and replaced it with wireless connections that drop out at toll plazas and infotainment systems that need rebooting like a Windows 98 desktop.
The Ascent starts around $40,000 and tops $50,000 in Touring trim. For that money, you get a competent if unremarkable three-row crossover powered by a turbocharged flat-four. Nothing about it screams rebellion.
But that tiny port next to the USB-C — a port that asks nothing of you, sells you nothing, and never needs a software update — is quietly the most honest piece of technology left in a new car. Enjoy it while it lasts. Subaru won’t build this one forever, and nobody coming after them is going to bring it back.
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