by John Shen

I struggled for some time with writing this review.

Truth be said, the xA was my car in college, so for me to write about the xA is a bit like having to quantifying college and distilling the experience, taking the car as a physical object aside from the car as an enabling experience, the modus operati for moving absurdly large pieces of furniture, for roadtrips and late night excursions, for dates and breakups. The story of the xA for me is inextricably linked to the ups and downs of college. And, even for me as an engineer whose used to just the numbers, it’s surprisingly difficult to separate the car as an object from the car as a backdrop to life.

And, I suspect, for many other Scion owners around the country, the exact same is true. This is a brand for those in flux through life.

So, with that unnecessarily long introduction, let’s start with basics. The xA is the european econobox made by Japan, a car that looked like a mouse on four wheels. Alongside its cousins in the Scion lineup the xA never made any sense: the tC was targeted towards college aged girls and rice racers, the xB toward aging hipsters and people with bad taste, but the xA was kind of an enigma: a subcompact and a four door hatch for a country that abhors both. 

The overwhelming feature of the car is its center mounted dash: a complete absurdity. I suppose if moving the dash to the center afforded a clear view of a well designed space between the windshield and the steering wheel, that might be excusable. Instead, cheap, untextured, monochromatic plastic fills the entire field of view in front of you, interrupted only by the glass of the windshield. Like all toyotas, this car exudes cheapness and lack of purpose and taste, designed to fill a need rather than a want, meant to be the quiet transportation appliance rather than an attractive centerpiece of one’s mobility.

The car as a whole can be best described as adequate. It has all the requisite parts as required and drives and handles to sufficient accord. The hatch and fold-down rear seats is quite useful, especially for a young 20something with unexpected IKEA trips and friends with luggage consistently in need of pickup from the airport. The manual transmission is surprisingly pleasant to drive, although I can imagine the toyota automatic sapping any joy that the 4-pot engine can manage to muster. Aside from that, it has 4 doors, and it comes with windshield wipers. 

As a college car, it’s exceedingly simple and reliable. a set of metric wrenches and the occasional replacement part was all I needed to keep it running for more than two years. Likewise, it’s extremely affordable to own and to maintain, and struggles terribly with getting LESS than 34mpg, regardless of how hard I flogged the 100-odd horsepower 4 cylinder. That engine, by the way, like everything in toyota’s stable, is undeserving of any adjective that even hints at implying “fast” or “responsive”, but serves it’s uninspired purpose merely adequately and sufficiently. 

In the end, maybe the xA is one of those things, like college, that’s easier to conceptualize as a warm and, on the surface, quite pleasant memory. That is, before you remember all the late night problem sets and horrid plastic interior, the 8am finals and the uncertain roadfeel and questionable value. 

Like college, the xA best makes sense as a transition car, something to get you through a relatively turbulent period of your life where certainty is far from guaranteed. A car that you can count on starting when on mornings when nothing else did, a car can count on your drunk friends being able to pile into, a car you can stuff an over-sized futon into, up so tight that the gearshift can’t shift into 2nd, 4th, or reverse.

But, once you have your diploma, once you get the chance to throw that square hat up in the air to pomp and circumstance, the Scion xA, along with the rest of the thoughts of all those heady, hazy, mischievous days, are best left to just that, a memory.

photo copyright middle class motoring