Junkyard Find: 2005 Scion XB, Devil Vampiress Edition
Toyotas mostly don’t show up in the big self-service wrecking yards until about age 15, so discarded Scion xB s are just beginning to appear in U-Wrench-It inventories. Here’s a Scion Toaster covered with totally brutal airbrush murals, spotted in a Denver-area yard a few months back.
I can’t tell whether the front body parts got wrecked prior to junking, or just sold off to junkyard customers after arrival. These cars are rare enough in the cheap yards that they tend to get picked over very quickly.
The Scion story — Toyota’s not-so-successful attempt to make a “youth brand” — would be an interesting topic of discussion by itself, but what’s going on with the airbrush murals here? The image of some sort of blue demonic woman with bat wings, devil horns, and pupil-less eyes adorns both sides of the car, for starters.
The flames play over heaps of skulls, no doubt wailing in a thermonuclear and/or frostbitten Hell.
There’s an aftermarket “carbon fiber” hood with bulge and racy latches, too, plus sporty wheels.
It’s no “Bite The Banana” Pontiac Aztek, of course, but I do have many questions about this car. If you can find some mention of its pre-junkyard existence online, let us know.
The kids must have gone crazy for this ad, a decade ago. Or not.
Perhaps some Devil Vampiress murals might have saved this poor xB.
The Japanese-market ads for the Toyota bB were similarly frantic.
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Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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These gen1 xBs were fantastic. Scion's problem was GII. Toyota took all the things that made gen1 great---small size, small engine, good fuel economy, and cuteness....and engineered those things out. GenII had 2.3L instead of 1.5L, was larger in size, more thirsty, more expensive, and fugly. To understand the failure of Scion, one need only understand the points listed here.
Man, this junkyard find makes me pine for the good ol' days of CrabSpirits backstories..