How depressing. Maybe your friend should care less about what other people think and more about what he LIKES. This may be the worst reason for selling a car I’v ever heard. Jeez, is 25 the new 14?

If one of my friends was selling his “beloved” car because of what SOME people MIGHT be thinking about it, I’d check him into a mental hospital. Or slap him.

Don’t worry though, Nissan is bringing over a replacement box.

The more I look at that newer bB the more I dislike it, just like the new xB. I think they should have kept the Rumion JDM styling, instead of “scionizing” it: it’s a lot more frank in its presentation, and in some respects still maintains older xB style cues. This new one looks like a guy with eye-shadow. More metrosexual than gangster (atleast IMO).

1. I have 3 kids. the backseat has a ton of legroom for children and adults.
2. yes, the interior is not as refined as some other cars, but with 3 kids, I didn’t want a fancy interior that they will probably destroy in a couple years anyway.
3. Cargo Room. Period. I’m a part time musician and DJ. I can fold down the back seats and put a ton of gear in this little buggy, go to my gigs, and get great gas mileage while I do it. Prior to this I had a truck which sucked down the gas.
4. Price. These are very practical cars for what you pay for them.
5. Toyota quality. Yes it has a camry engine, and the Scion XB is still actually made in japan, unlike most other toyotas which are made in mexico or canada. Where do you think the best quality control is?
6. Looks: no, this wont appeal to everyone, but I like a car that looks different than every other boring car rolling down the road.

Ok, there are a few things I would change if I could, but overall I’ve been very happy so far with this vehicle. I would buy one again if I had to do it over. I am 45 years old, not a young person this car was designed to be marketed to. It just so happened this could do everything i needed, haul kids, haul equipment, had lots of passenger room, decent gas mileage (avg 28mpg), and didnt break the bank to own.

Scion pricing is NOT like Saturn’s. Scion dealers must have fixed pricing, but the fixed price does not have to be MSRP. They can offer discounts as long as they offer the same discounts to everyone.

Saturn dealers can, and do, do the exact same thing (provided the discount is the same for all cars of a certain model/trim line/group of options). This works in reverse as well. That is, most Saturn dealers marked up Skys over list when it first came out.

In fact, it is illegal for the manufacturer (of anything) to insist on a specific price for a dealer to sell the product for. (A recent Supreme Court ruling weakened this somewhat, but it’s still basically the law.) Another example in a different industry is Nintendo. Nintendo, in the 1980’s and 1990’s, attempted to set a minimum price for their consoles, by with holding stock from anybody who refused. Stores sued them and Nintendo lost.

That is, Scion’s and Saturn’s pricing policies are identical.

Like others here, I wanted to like the new xB, but it is just too damn silly. There are many improvements over the original, but the dashboard is goofy, the seats are unbelievably cheap and the front end is ridiculous looking.

A true shame. There aren’t many inexpensive wagons out there that are roomy enough to haul stuff and available with a manual. (and nearly all the small CUVs are auto only).

Unfortunately fixed pricing means “bend over the sink” on your trade. We were offered $1500 on a car that we traded into Honda on a new Civic for $7000. AND Honda came down on the price of the car for less than the Tc or Xb.

That combined with the atmosphere of something outta the Fast and Furious really turned us off to Scion. I’m sure they’re great cars… if your 18 and it’s your 1st car.

After driving his car, I wanted an xB. No more. This generation looks like it was designed by a committee. If I want a dragster, I’ll buy one. If I want a small van, I want a small van. So I’m waiting on Nissan’s Cube now. Seems like they “get it.”

If I wanted looks I’d buy…well, just about anything else. All those Ford Focus haters who swear it’s the homeliest thing on the road just need to take a look over here. I know, styling is a personal thing–but the fact that this thing looks just like the xD and the Matrix (not to mention a 1980 Buick Riviera) pretty much scotches any claim to outrageous individuality. Meanwhile, the dark interior and huge blind spots pretty much scotch any claim to functionality.

The (few) folks I see driving around in these things look like 20-year-olds stuffed into Hannah Montana T-shirts from Wal-Mart. Ordinary and ridiculous at the same time. The slumping Scion sales numbers, even in the face of a stampede to smaller cars, suggests I’m not the only one who feels this way.

I can live with the sky-high roofline, but the eight inches of ground clearance that most cars like this get bugs me. I think Toyota did well in not making this into Yet Another Soft Roader.

It works, though, as a replacement for the prior-generation RAV/4. With the new one moving (way) up size and power, there was a definite hole in Toyota’s lineup. Of course, they could have achieved the same thing by not upsizing the RAV4 cutting the highway-robbery MSRP of the Highlander.

That being said, it does seem to me that something was lost in the redesign. The original I heard was quite fun to drive and economy minded.

I’m reminded of a late-70s Doonesbury cartoon, where someone tries to explain to a pollster that giving an “unsatisfactory” rating to Jimmy Carter is not the same as giving the same rating to Richard Nixon, noting, “One is an expression of dissatisfaction with an incompetent — the other is an expression of loathing for a crook. They’re not the same thing!”

The Cobalt’s rating (or that of the H3) was intended as a defense of a car a lot of us have trashed a lot, on the grounds that it’s functionally competent, if not at all inspired. The TSX’s rating reflected disappointment with a car that, while not completely without merit, has lost a lot of the charm of its excellent predecessor.

In this case, I think it amounts to bafflement with a new version of something that was never really a TTAC commentator’s kind of car, but that at least managed to be commendably unique. The new car is more competent in a driving sense than the previous car, but not enough so to make it a credible alternative to more TTAC-friendly cars like the Mazda3 hatchback.

Who is smoking what?