Hello - I just bought my xA last night-woohoo! The pics they have of the xA with the racks on the website are pretty limited. Does anyone have pics of their xA with racks? I'd like a full view of the car with racks on it - not just the roof.
Thanks in advance!

 

 

 

Thanks soo much! They look good. Are they the Yakima racks?

 

yes, those are yakima racks for the scion xA.

 

holds at 90mph.. downhill.. ha

 

So you get the Yakima Q towers for $236 and then pick your attachments-bike, snowboard etc...? I was looking at the raptor for bikes. Do you have to buy them from the dealer? On Yakima's site-they only have 2005 fittings.

 

Any word on factory vs private company tint jobs? I think it's $395 from the dealer.

 

In my experience roof racks are a real pain in the ___. I had a pair of Yakima Raptor bike racks on the factory rack of my old car, and here's my experience with them:

Bikes are a pain in the ___ to load/unload from the top of the car. My old car was a WRX which isn't quite as tall as the xA, so it'd be even worse with the new Scion.

Raptor racks really suck for loading/unloading. You secure the wheels to the rack with these two modules that kind of resemble large cable ties, and releasing them from "closed" position is very hard to do, sometimes it would take me 5 minutes of fiddling with them on each wheel to get the bikes off of the car. It helps if you have a second person there to feed the notched strip through but I don't know how you'd do it by yourself.

Forget about the roof of your car ever looking nice, unless you're the kind of guy who hand washes/waxes your car. Most car washes won't even touch the roof after it comes out of the car wash with all of the racks attached. They're too busy for that. Dirt seems to accumulate there especially, although maybe it was because I had a black car. At some point you can expect some minor paint imperfections on the roof if you do a lot of loading/unloading.

Really, unless you already have the bike racks from your old car, you should probably just go for a receiver hitch and a hitch bike rack. The hitch will cost you around $180 including shipping (I've seen it for $140 on the web about $40 shipping). You can get a hitch mount bike rack for under $150 if you look around, I got a Thule rack for $140 using my REI discount. $180+$150 is probably less expensive than $235 + Raptor rack(s) + Lock cores, especially if you have more than one bike. And it doesn't mess up your roof or your profile.

 

We went with Yakima bars for a cargo pod. I dismissed hitch receiver options as the manual specifically says no-no to towing or receiver mount racks. Oh well, at least we'll have access to the hatchback without hassle.

Probably would work; I had a hitch on a Geo Metro XFI and towed a small sailboat with it. Never did see another Metro with a hitch, either.