7 Cars Americans Can Buy That Canadians Can't

Michael Phelps has won more gold medals in the pool at the last four Summer Olympics than the whole Team Canada claimed, across all events, in the last seven.

Despite currently producing more total medals per capita than the American team in Rio, we Canadians can be found suffering from an inferiority complex. And yes, per capita medal counts are the kinds of statistics you can expect from the citizens of a nation that suffer from an inferiority complex.

It doesn’t help that Canada’s new vehicle market, one-ninth the size of the U.S. market, is deemed too small to benefit from one of the planet’s best sports sedan values, the Chevrolet SS.

Yet the Chevrolet SS is by no means the only new vehicle on sale in the United States that doesn’t cross the border.

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2016 Is On Track To Be The Scion Brand's Best Year Since... Oh Wait A Second

Quick trivia: what’s the fastest-growing auto brand in America?

Jeep? Land Rover? GMC? Ram? Volvo?

Year-over-year, through the first four months of 2016, sales at Scion — Toyota’s 13-year-old youth-directed brand — are up 53 percent. It’s not just recovery after a poor start to 2015. Scion is on track for its best year since 2008.

Well, Scion would be on track for U.S. sales to rise to an eight-year high if, by the end of this year, Scion still existed.

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Toyota's Best-Selling Subcompact Is A Scion-Badged Mazda, Naturally

The best-selling Toyota subcompact in America is a Mexican-built Mazda that’s sold as a Scion and will soon be sold as a Toyota. It’s a car that’s already called the Yaris R in Mexico and the Yaris Sedan in Canada.

Meanwhile, Toyota’s once hot-selling subcompact, the Toyota-branded Yaris, is a hatchback imported from France that scarcely attracts any attention at all.

In between, Toyota’s actual Japanese-built Prius C is increasingly unpopular.

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UPDATE 2: Will Toyota Kill Off the Scion Brand Today?

Update 2: Toyota has officially announced Scion’s “transition to Toyota.”

Update 1: Road&Track is reporting it has confirmed the rumor with an inside source and the death of Scion will be publicly announced later today.

A top-secret meeting took place Tuesday afternoon to announce the death of the Scion brand to employees, reports CarBuzzard (via Motor Trend). The company is rumored to make the announcement public today.

We at TTAC have openly wondered about the future of Scion, though recent sales performance of new products looked to have put the youth-oriented brand on the right track.

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A Tale Of Two Scions: Scion IA Vs. Scion IM

I call Scions “the acronyms from hell” because even I have trouble keeping up with all of them.

iQ, iA, iM, tC, xB, xD. Did I forget one? The xA and…wait! I forgot the FR-S, but that’s only because I rarely see those go through the auction block. Everything else, save the two new iA and iM models, seems to make a perennial pilgrimage to the wholesale heaven of unwanted used cars for one unfortunate reason.

Scion, historically, can’t help but hit ’em where the customers ain’t.

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Failure to Launch: Mazda Canada Decides to Pass on Mazda2, Will Focus on Crossovers

After officially giving the Mazda2 its North America reveal in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in January, Mazda Canada announced, nearly 10 months later, it will not sell the subcompact hatchback in the country.

“Following a thorough evaluation of the B-car segment, Mazda Canada has decided not to launch the new generation Mazda2 in Canada,” Mazda Canada said in a statement released Monday.

Instead, the company will focus on its CX lineup, including the CX-3, CX-5 and new, upcoming CX-9 to be revealed for the first time this week in Los Angeles.

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Scion Rising - If IA and IM Help, Imagine What C-HR Could Do

We haven’t held back our critique of Toyota’s handling of its Scion sub-brand.

Though Scion held such promise a decade ago, replacing the hot-selling first-generation xB with a mostly ignored, overweight, second-generation xB was a ticket to failure. Allowing the once-popular tC to linger mostly unchanged and mostly unathletic for more than a decade is akin to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. A flash in the pan sports car, the FR-S, wasn’t – couldn’t be – the answer to the brand’s troubles.

Signs of life are once again appearing at Scion, however, and not from the most expected places.

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Scion Second-Fastest Growing Brand In September; New IA And IM Lead

The FR-S did not turn out to be Scion’s savior. Doubts regarding the ability of a conventional hatchback and a subcompact sedan — the brand’s first sedan — to rescue a brand that was built on unconventional cars have been expressed in many corners.

Yet with the arrival of those two cars, the iA and iM, Scion was the fastest-growing car brand in America in September 2015 and the second-fastest-growing brand overall.

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Porsche Is Now Outselling Scion – Will Scion Ever Come Back?

Only seven years removed from selling more than 100,000 cars in the United States, Scion’s current woes are more easily understood by looking at the brands which now outsell Toyota’s “youth” brand.

One such Scion-besting automaker: Porsche.

Rewind just one year and Scion, through the first eight months of 2014, was outselling Porsche by 10,000 units. Yet in the first eight months of 2015, Scion only outsold Porsche three times — in February, March, and May — and trails Porsche by nearly 2,200 sales heading into September.

Porsche is certainly not a Scion rival. Even the FR-S, Scion’s most costly car, costs only half as much as Porsche’s least expensive car, a basic, un-optioned Boxster. (Is there even such a thing?)

But the change in order speaks volumes about Porsche’s steady climb to record highs and the fall of Scion, the latter of which saw its share of the U.S. market fall by 73 percent, from 1.04 percent in 2006 to 0.28 percent in 2015.

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2016 Scion IA Review With Video - Mono-Priced Zoom-Zoom

When is a Scion not a Scion? Since Scion is division of Toyota, this is both a trick question and a serious one.

Scions can be anything from tweaked Toyotas and foreign market Toyotas to cars built by other manufacturers for Scion. The first such product was the collaboratively developed Scion FR-S / Subaru BRZ / Toyota 86. The second is this Mazda-designed and Mazda-built Scion iA.

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Generation Why: Invasion Of The Bodystyle Snatches

We don’t have the rights to run the spy photos of the Scion iA concept, but you can check them out here. The above rendering, from TopSpeed, is 99.9% accurate, for better or for worse. On the surface, it looks like an uglier version of the Mazda2 sedan, with the unfortunate catfish maw grafted on in place of the rather handsome Mazda front end treatment. The on paper sepcs aren’t exactly thrilling either.

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New York 2015: Scion IA Revealed
Spy photographers have caught the Scion iA sans camo ahead of its New York Auto Show debut. For the full set of pictures, please click here.
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  • Tassos On the SERIOUS Side: A Reliable ROlls ROyce never imported in the US was the V12 CENTURY. Now you can import 25+ year olds, which may be OK for Tim but NOT for us who need an UP TO DATE vehicle. The Century was a top exec car with a SUMPTUOUS interior, far superior even to the Lexus LS. UNfortunately, the latest century model is a Rolls Royce CULLINAN CLONE SUV, which I would not be dead driving. I suggest Toyota EXPLOIT their experience with the Century and produce a FLAGSHIP SEDAN that will be EQUAL to RR in luxury AND far better in RELIABILITY and at half the price of buying AND 10% of the cost of OWNING due to much less repairs. I am SURE the market is so small in this segment, that they will NOT do it, and deprive us of this LEGENDARY Vehicle in the Future As well.
  • Lou_BC I pulled over into a road side rest stop once because the rain got so bad that I could barely see. Several other vehicles followed. As I sat there in my F150 watching, a Corvette wailed by. How could they not feel the vehicle hydroplaning? The steering on my heavy truck with excellent tires felt numb.
  • Lou_BC Maloo GTSR W1
  • MaintenanceCosts E34 M5 3.8. Not sure there has ever been a more charismatic engine than the S38B38.
  • 28-Cars-Later Sadly, fewer motorists bothering to buy insurance [because they are unwanted illegal aliens] will likewise be used as an excuse to raise rates on those that do.