Washed and waxed my new tC for the first time this weekend. Man, the bodywork is flimsy. The hood and especially doors visibly bowed in under the light pressure of hand-applying and buffing the wax. I actually started to wonder if the door panels are plastic.

The paint job is pretty awful as well. Looks okay from a distance, but get up close and it's vast expanses of orange peel. I've done a better job with a spray can.

Going to have to build up ten or fifteen coats of wax to give the paint a little more protection over the winter...

But that's okay, because I still think the car drives smoother and handles better than my dad's Acura 3.2TL.

--mark

 

Yep I came to the same conclusion when I waxed my car, and again when I installed my Hotchkis springs. From the outside, all looks great but when you start to dig you can see where they cut costs.

 

What can we say, its $17k!

 

Ohh you will notice more than that , that kept it "COST EFFECTIVE" HAHAHAHAHAHA

 

Low price is no excuse for shoddy work. That's the Yugo philosophy.

VW had it right with the original beetle. Look inside the doors and you'll find paint as good as that applied to the outside of the car. They understood (then) that low price comes from good engineering, not from cutting corners.

On my xB, they even scrimped on the paint inside the fuel filler door. Bad.

 

My tC's paint job is no better/worse than the other five cars I have owned. On a positive note, the car (FM) keeps its shine much longer than any car I have ever owned.

Kevin

 

Im waiting for one of the local Brains to chime in on this one with "noone looks at your gas door " or "Dont drive with it open all the time" . If only these people were president we would be even a greater nation <rolls eyes>

 

thats not the only thing..... tee hee

 

Yeah. I already noticed that there's almost no undercoat on the bottom of the car, for instance. That kind of sucks, living in Vermont. Some weekend soon I'll need to get under there with a few cans of the spray-on stuff so the car at least has some protection from road salt.

Kinda funny, because my '93 Honda Civic had a full, extremely durable undercoat, decent-quality paint job, solid body panels, etc. Of course, it also had no AC, no stereo (when I bought it), no power steering (or power anything else, for that matter), no sunroof, skinny little tires on 13" steel wheels, and a 1.5-liter engine that made less horsepower than most modern motorcycles.

I still think the tC's a great car, I'm just getting a little worried about its long-term durability. I was hoping to drive this car for at least a decade.

--mark

 

The body (bumpers, doors, hood, and all that stuff) is made from recycled toyota parts.

 

i disagree, from what ive looked at the car its excellently engineered and uses awesome parts - the paint is the exact same paint off of Flint Mica Lexii, so i doubt its bad quality - lots of other parts also come from lexus, like the stalks..etc...and if you look at the engine, all the wires and hoses are routed such that they wont fray or get cut - also, at bend points and contact points, they are covered with plastic or tied down to something......i think the car will last a very long time, especially if taken care of.

 

If the most common complaints that are made about a car are in the league of "my hatch rattles" and "my paint seems thin", then it is a good car. Complaints like "My transmission won't go into third" or "my engine burst into flames" are more worthy of noting-- and indicate a "bad" car.

If even 1 in 10 tC buyers had opted for a Focus instead... well, we'd hear at least 10% less whining here, and the Focus boards could more than take up the slack, what with the most often recalled modern car.

 

"the paint is the exact same paint off of Flint Mica Lexii, so i doubt its bad quality"

That's not terribly bright logic. Doesn't matter if it's the same paint if they dont take the same care in applying it on the tC as they do on a lexus.

 

and the fact that my sheet metal already looks wavy, and the sheet metal on my mom's RX330 does not, tells me there's a difference in the quality of materials.

 

You get what you pay for never stood taller. Personally, I love the car. Regardless of how thin the paint is, and how much the hatch rattles. That's all stuff that can be fixed by ourselves given you have the skills. When a car company recalls a crapload of their vehicles because the cruise control starts the whole car on fire, that's a bad car.
My s-10 rattles, but it's all something that either I can fix, or I can turn up the radio to drown it out.

 

The key here is that Scion is marketing themselves as being a great car for the money, and I do believe they're accomplishing that in the short term. We'll see how things pan out in a few years, but for the time being I'm content. Having owned cars that fall within the general price range of the tC, I think it's fair to say that there are plenty of other cars out there which don't have these problems; however, there are plenty which do. If Scion is trying to set themselves apart from the pack, they'll need to address the sorts of issues which are keeping people from enjoying their cars to their fullest extent. VW is an example of a company which has allowed their reputation to sit in the sh*tter due to poor reliability, but they have one thing on their side: Loyalty from previous owners. Scion hasn't established that and they won't as long as people's first experience with them isn't favorable.

 

Toyota is the only company in the world with a 99% recycle rate. They buy back old toyota cars and reuse the steel and plastics. This does not cut down on quality, becuase if it did, then the sodas you drink and the park benches you sit on and such would just fall apart as much as you say your car would. I would have to say that Toyota has surpassed what most have tried to do, or else ford would be using their own hybrid powerplants. Take the BMW mini for instance, easily starting around 19 or so for the S. I have seen nothing but recall after recall and quite a bit of electrical problems. It is a BMW, but cmon, for about the same price range, I would say the Toyota definitely has better qualty.

 

atleast it pass the hw crash test with pretty good scores

 

I don't view the body panel flex as a bad thing—I mean think about it: It bounces right back to where it's supposed to be (I've had a BlueHair in a LeSabre open her door into me and no dent but, sadly, a nice scratch—oh well. If the panels where "harder" then dents and dings would happen easier.

The thin paint (might be the same paint as Lexus/Toyota but with half as many coats), notchy seat rails and lower quality interior materials are how they—and you—saved money.

 

I still think I made a good choice buying the Scion, and I agree that overall it's a well-engineered car. My durability concerns mainly revolve around corrosion. That's not a major concern in much of the US, but here in Vermont cars rust away amazingly quickly. Thin paint and light-gauge sheet metal don't help. I'll need to make sure I get ten or fifteen coats of wax on there before winter...

--mark