The 2025 Subaru Forester looks more like an office-park SUV than its predecessors—you could easily lose track of one parked between an Explorer and a RAV4 in the same color. But to keep a pulse of whimsy alive in the brand, Subaru snuck little decorative details into almost every corner of the new Forester. People like to call these “Easter Eggs,” and we tracked down the backstory on pretty much all of them.
I say “we” but most of the credit for this contextualizing belongs to Aaron Cole. A former editor at The Drive who now works for Subary—and has been one of my buds for years. Recently, a 2025 Forester popped up in my Facebook feed when an owner was pointing out GPS coordinates engraved in the floormats, and wondered what their significance was.
I immediately emailed Mr. Cole, who was quick to answer and had a comprehensive info dump on the new Forester’s slightly hidden iconography.
I couldn’t lay it out any better than him, so here you go:
“All interior protection accessories on Forester, including the all-weather floor liners, rear cargo tray, rear seatback protectors, rear cargo area side panel protectors and the front and rear door panel scuff protectors have topographical map patterns with Easter eggs buried in them. The mud flaps do too,” said Cole.
“The interior topographical map patterns are taken from real maps of National Parks, and there’s a Subaru four-pointed star marked in each of the maps in the location of a significant landmark or natural feature in that park, which the GPS coordinates correspond to,” he added. “Our accessories team selected parks from different areas of the country to live in the different areas of the vehicle—West Coast, East Coast, Great Lakes, and Midwest.
“In the case of the floor mats, the fronts are both from Olympic National Park in Washington state—driver’s side is Sunrise Point, and the passenger side is Maiden Peak. The front door panel scuff protectors also have points from Olympic National Park, so the whole front seat area is from Olympic, our West Coast park.
“The rears are from Great Smokey Mountains National Park in North Carolina/Tennessee—driver’s side is Clingmans Dome (now called Kuwohi, its Cherokee name) and passenger side is Laurel Falls. Similar to the front seat area, the rear door scuff protector accessories have maps and points from the same park,” Cole added.
“The cargo area accessories (cargo tray, side panel protectors and rear seatback protectors) all form a single giant map of Cuyahoga National Park in Ohio, with Brandywine Falls as the major feature marked with the star and coordinates.
Finally (my personal favorite) the mud flaps have sections of Paul Bunyan State Forest in Minnesota, home of Ojibwe Forests Rally … and the significant points marked are the start and finish points of Stage 6 and Stage 7 from that rally. It’s Travis Pastrana’s favorite rally.”
Unfortunately, there’s no readily available photo of that particular mud flap. But here’s what that rally route looked like in 2024:
And if you’re reading this before Summer 2025, looks like there will be racing there again on August 21.
Beyond those specific call-outs, the new Forester also has a smattering of other outdoorsy images tucked into various pieces of the cabin. Look closely and you’ll find boot prints, paw prints, and a compass as part of plastic kick panels. A few little birds adorn various glass elements, too.
The cargo area cover features a particularly large topo map graphic, which extends onto the back of the second-row seats if you order the optional protector piece. Most of those items have been discussed in other places around the internet, but I couldn’t find an explanation of the GPS points and a roundup of tiny decorations in the same spot, so here we are.
If you didn’t get it from the jump, I’m sure you now understand what we mean by “Easter Egg” in the context of cars. Of course, hunting for little graphics is like hunting for eggs at Easter—a holiday tradition going at least as far back as 1682. That phrase came into consumerist vernacular decades ago with software, referring to when video game developers hide visual elements somewhere for hardcore fans to find and appreciate.
One could argue that automotive Easter Eggs have been around almost as long as cars, but I blame the pervasiveness of it today on Jeep. Jeep famously slipped some little decorative nods to its heritage on the JK Wrangler, and then went HAM on the idea when the Renegade came out. The brand had to do everything it could to convince the world that body-swapped Fiat was a Jeep, and it did so partially by cramming it full of cutesy slightly hidden decorations for bloggers to find and get excited about. Looks like that formula has worked again, here we are talking about the Forester because of some shaped plastic!
I’m not hating. I appreciate any effort to give a car a little artistic joy.
Got any favorite automotive Easter Eggs we might not know about? Shoot the author an email at andrew.collins@thedrive.com.
