i am so tired of bastards telling me my car is ugly.......
The first car to catch my eye at Budget was Toyota's youth-brand Scion xB. You've probably noticed this thing on the road—seemingly about as square as a vehicle can be, with a sinister giant-shaver front end. It looks like an electrogothic cab of death! Even its name and creepy logo appear to be those of the villainous organization in a James Bond movie. "We have reports that SCION is really a front for a madman bent on world domination." It's not cute. When I first saw one, I thought it was coming to ferry me across the river Styx. Room for one more inside, sir!
Now I love it. Why? First, it completes the deconstruction of the SUV that began with the "cute ute" Toyota RAV4. The RAV4 answered the question, "What if you kept the SUV's tough, off-road image but subtracted the heavy chassis and gas-chugging V-8?" Then came the Honda Element, which (like the RAV4) had the guts of an economy car but (unlike the RAV4) managed to keep an SUV's cavernous interior volume. Now comes the Scion, which subtracts two more factors in the traditional SUV equation—pointlessly high ground clearance and four-wheel drive.
What's left, you ask? The tall, boxy shape. The Scion is one size smaller than the Element—it's the box that came inside the Element's box, if you will—and its roof is a couple of inches lower to the ground. But the Scion's floor plan also rides low, near the pavement, like a car's—meaning that from floor to ceiling, the smaller Scion seems to match the Element, or an average SUV, for absurdly generous interior volume—and it kills conventional cars. (The Scion has 109 cubic feet of interior room. The suburban fave Volvo V70 wagon has only 98.3 cubic feet, according to Automobile.) Who needs a "tall" truck? You still sit high enough in a Scion to look down on cars—a function of upright seats—and I counted 4 extravagant inches between my head and the roof. Yet it gets 30 miles to the gallon. Happy now, Arianna?
You gain a lot by losing all that SUV. Like low mass, and a low center of gravity. My rental Scion handled shockingly well. You could throw it around corners as if you weren't practically standing straight up like a tourist stuck to the wall at one of those whirling antigravity rides. And while the Element accelerates as if it were a subway during a work-to-rule slowdown, the Scion scoots. Plus the ride (criticized in some car mags) seemed almost creamy on my near-new sample. Brakes? Good. Turning circle? Lousy, but who cares.
Final selling point: a peculiar kind of authenticity, as an unadulterated example of a weird, hybrid, previously nonexistent automotive genre. The Element is a fake Panzer, badly in need of a big, tough engine to match its big, tough looks. The Scion is exactly what it pretends to be: a polished, snazzy-looking carrier for you and your friends that does everything you need an urban car to do. It's fast enough and more than roomy enough—a serotonin-elevating design statement, with its lip-gloss paint job, speckled seats and happy off-kilter speedometer. (Even the Vehicle ID plate is cool-looking.) You can carry practically anything and have about as much fun carrying it as you can have legally in a front-drive vehicle on public roads. You can give it to the valet at Michael's and everyone will smile at you.
Did I mention that it costs about $14,000, including CD player? That's what makes this box so deeply subversive of the automobile market. Why does anyone have to buy anything more? Do you need to pay $40,000 for a "near luxury" vehicle that makes you look like another climbing careerist and won't get you the valet smile? What can a Jaguar X-type do again—legally, within the confines of Los Angeles—that the Scion can't? It makes no sense to play the automotive one-upping game when for $14,000 you can look good while laughing at the game (thereby winning it). True, that's always been possible by driving a cheap-chic used car (like an old 1960s GM creamboat). But it's previously been impossible to pull off in a new vehicle.
The market Toyota is pursuing with the xB is the young—21-year-olds just out of college, skateboarders, etc. I don't know if those people will go for it. But a market Scion has hit dead-on is the rich, the same people who eagerly buy Vuitton copy bags at house parties and then wink at each other. They have mansions. They don't need to waste money on anything else. But they might need a second or third car to haul things.
Finally, the Scion makes other cars seem absurdly, pointlessly, tragically ... round. What does all that swooping and carving and tumblehoming do again, other than rob you of the interior space that your footprint on the asphalt says is rightfully yours? Why would anyone want to spend, say, five grand extra on Toyota's rounded, thick-walled Matrix when that $5,000 buys you a claustrophobic, egg-like interior with 12 fewer cubic feet of room? Drive a Scion for a few days and you'll see other cars the way Humbert Humbert saw college girls—as repulsively over-ripe.
On a scale of 1-10 in the patented Gearbox Parking Lot Test—measuring how happy I was to come out of a movie and see it waiting for me—I give this anti-car an 8. That's as high as I'm likely to give a front-driver. But before you run out and buy it, you should know a few things:
1) It lists for $14,000, but Scion dealers around L.A. are tacking on all sorts of pointless appearance options and getting about $20,000. The appearance add-ons allegedly allow you to "individualize" your Scion, but mainly they make it uglier (or "even uglier," depending on your initial assessment). The $20,000 price makes it uglier, too.
2) It's surprisingly tinny in a few spots, for a Toyota. The thin metal rear door in my rental vehicle buzzed, and the key fob stopped locking and unlocking the doors early on. In fact, the Scion brand came off shockingly poorly on a recent J.D. Power Initial Quality Survey, with 158 complaints per 100 vehicles—mainly relatively minor problems. (The industry average is 119.) Some Texas customers have groused that the Scion's A.C. isn't strong enough to handle the local climate.
3) The xB may not look cool forever. My mother, who is either a lagging or leading indicator, said it looked like an English van that should be "hauling sides of beef." The point of reference was lost on me. (Hauling sides of beef sounds pretty cool!) But it's possible that if enough Scions—and soon-to-come competing cubes—populate the roads, they'll stop looking fun and start to look dull, the way square "space container" buildings began to look dull once you'd seen enough of them. One way for Toyota to keep the Scion subversive would be to go Swatchy—keep the good cheap mechanicals but use computer technology to redo the styling every year, so $14,000 always buys you attention. They could even charge $15,000.
Stare at the Scion often enough, in fact, and one way to make it hipper-looking becomes glaringly obvious. You see, its lines are not completely straight. They could be straighter! There's a slight backward rake to the front, and a non-trivial 2- or 3-inch "tumblehome" as the cabin rises to the roof. Its rear window is at maybe an 87 degree angle to the road. Even its straight lines are made by creases with rounded edges. You can't help thinking: Wouldn't it be neat if someone made a car that really was square? ....
P.S.: Memo to New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission: Why isn't the Scion your new Yellow Cab?
By Mickey Kaus
* This post has been modified
: 19 years ago
