Where is the centre of the North Island? We use the smallest Subaru SUV to reach that spot.

Subaru XV Premium
Price:  $42,490.
Powertrain and performance:  2.0-litre four-cylinder horizontally opposed petrol engine; 115kW/6000rpm, 196Nm/4000rpm. All-wheel drive.
Vital statistics: Length 4465mm, height 1615mm with roof rails, width 1800mm, wheelbase 2665mm. Luggage 310 litres.
Wheels: 18-inch alloys with 225/5 R18 tyres.
We like: Balanced ride and handling, ground clearance, substantial feel, safety specification.
We don’t like: Body shape starting to date, so is the engine.

SORRY Wellington,  but we’re reminded of that old joke.

Question:  How many Wellingtonians does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: Just one – they simply hold on to the bulb and the whole world revolves around them.

While Wellington often seems to regard itself as the centre of everything, in fact our capital city isn’t even the centre of New Zealand – well, geographically anyway.

That honour goes to Nelson, which has a monument on the top of Botanical Hill which proclaims the spot to  the geographic centre of our country. But that’s not entirely true either – the official spot is actually about 50km away in the middle of Golden Downs Forest.

Mind you, even Nelson’s claimed central location is better than that suggested a few years ago by scientists who said that if all of New Zealand’s continental shelf is included in the calculations, then the country’s geographic centre should be located 11km north-west of Greytown in Wairarapa.

It’s tempting to think that if said scientists regard the sea bed as part of New Zealand’s land mass, then maybe they should attempt to live there...

There’s always been some debate about the exact location of the centre of the North Island, too. Because of its Te-Ika-a-Maui shape, various claims have been made that the centre is at Waharoa north of Matamata, and at Horahora near Cambridge, and at the base of Mt Titiraupenga in the middle of Pureora Forest Park.

Personally we’re in favour of the Pureora location, because we love the story about how it was located.

In 1961 a Taupo surveyor created a cardboard cut-out of the North Island, bent it slightly to take into account the curvature of the earth, then suspended it using a pin and thin nylon. When a perfect balance was obtained, the spot where the pin was stuck was deemed the geographic centre of the island. As good a way as any, huh?

During our research we discovered there’s a plinth deep in the Pureora Forest that marks that spot – so we decided we should find it. And we further decided that to find this perfectly central location we should use a vehicle brand that is all about balance.

So we chose Subaru. After all, all its models are all-wheel drive. They are all powered by boxer engines with low centres of gravity. As a result, all the brand’s vehicles are among the most balanced on the market.

Our research further told us that actually getting to the official centre of the North Island is a bit of a mission, especially in the middle of winter, because there are several kilometres of rough unsealed road to be negotiated. So we felt that removed Subaru’s lower-riding Impreza, WRX, Levorg and Legacy models out of the selection, leaving an SUV choice of XV, Forester or Outback.

We got our hands on an XV, which in essence is a jacked-up and SUV-ised version of the Impreza five-door hatch, complete with hard plastic bodyshell protection, bigger wheels and tyres, and perhaps most importantly a 220mm ride height.

Our XV was a good one, too. A top $42,490 Premium model that has just undergone a minor facelift that has seen a bit of cosmetic change, some minor powertrain adjustments, and improvements to the brand’s EyeSight driver assist technology.

The XV is one of two Subaru models – the other is the Forester – that have recently also become available as an eBoxer mild hybrid.

But for our assignment our XV was the conventional version, powered by a 2.0-litre four cylinder boxer engine that offered 115 kW of power and 196Nm of torque.

So where to go? We were instructed to drive along SH30 between Te Kuiti and Whakamaru, turn off the highway at a dot of a place called Barryville to end up at a DOC facility at Pureora, then enter the forest park itself along an unsealed route called Link Rd.

This we duly did, and it wasn’t long before we were really appreciating the extra ground clearance as we picked our way along a route that got increasingly rough.  The, just as we were beginning to worry that somehow we’d missed our destination, we reached a turnoff signposted Centre of North Island Rd.

Then after a short drive down an even rougher piece of roading, we reached a carpark where we parked our XV and walked 300 metres through bush to the plinth.  It was located in a little clearing, sitting alongside DOC signage that indicates various walking and cycling tracks in the area.

Truth be told, it was all a little underwhelming. Maybe, we thought, considering just how the location had been found close to 60 years ago, the centre of the North Island could have been better marked not by a concrete plinth – but by a big sculpture representing a pin....

So we turned around the drove home again, scrabbling our way along the rough and very wet Link Rd, before finally getting our by now very muddy XV Premium  back onto SH30.

The Subaru XV is an unassuming sort of small SUV. It does come in for criticism from some quarters for a lack of power, but we feel this is often because the critics don’t quite understand how boxer engines work.

Granted, our XV would no doubt offer improved performance if it were fitted with  the 2.5-litre engine from the slightly larger Forester SUV – which is going to happen in North America where the XV is called Crosstrek – but even with 2.0-litre power the vehicle has a strong feel about it.

In typical Subaru fashion, this vehicle enjoys being worked, both on the road and off it. Which is just as well, because the boxer engine does need to be worked.

Even thought the XV’s interior dimensions are the same as the Impreza hatch, it feels a lot more substantial. Maybe it’s the higher ride height and the fact that at the Premium level it is shod with 18-inch wheels and tyres, but this Subaru feels a lot bigger than it actually is.

And that potentially positions the XV as the most offroad-ready small SUVs currently on the market, to the extent we’d be happier taking one off the seal than we might do in such product as Mazda CX-3, Hyundai Kona, Kia Seltos and Hyundai Venue.