I drove my 06 xA from Cedar Rabbits IA, to Savannah GA (and back) this past week, and here are some impressions and bland factoids resulting from the long drive.

Number of other Scion xAs seen: 2 driver ages: 50s at least.
Number of Scion xBs seen: 18.
Number of those xBs with drivers under 30: 3.
Number of xBs sporting apparent external mods: 1.
Number of tCs seen: 5
Number of waves from any other Scion owners: 0

Most numerous 06 model car: Toyota Rav4 (lots and lots of them for a first year)
Curiously absent: Chevrolet HHR (1)
Most broken down on side of the road: Tie: 95+ Ford Taurus (4); 95+ Ford Contour (4)


Mileage:
I drove the posted speed limit as to keep my fatigue down. and the RPMS south of 3000 in my 06 Auto
avg mileage was 37.5 MPG

Performance Impressions:
Being a 150lb stick boy, and carrying only 50lbs of luggage made for a light xA, acceleration was very adequate, except when going through the Appalachians, when going through the Cumberland Gap at altitude, the xA was really ******* in the thinner air. Going back downhill a 7% slope was not quite enough to sustain a gas off speed of 60mph.


Most Spooky
I checked the air in my tires when I started back, and found that the dealer had inflated them to 44psi! That's one psi short of Max on the tire, and considerably higher than the 29psi reccomended inflation! And that was cold temperature! They had been rolling hot on the trip down at probably 50psi!!! I backed down the pressure considerably, and that improved handling noticebly, with less of a tendency to follow road ruts.

All in all a fun trip, the xA's driving experience was considerably more enjoyable than my previous SC2 Saturn coupe. Noise isolation, cabin environment, awesome stereo, spaciousness.

Coulda used cruise control though.

 

i get the same issue with any other scion owners unless i know the person as of late. i get waved to by one person in a tc only because i know her. other than that the majority of xa owners are over 50 as well here. i see maybe 1-2 if that. the xb is similar but with more of a split on age.

 

I'm moving from Milwaukee, WI to San Diego, CA next month so I'll let you guys know how the drive goes. I'm not looking forward to climbing up the Rockies in my xA (especially since she'll be loaded up with all my stuff) but I'm sure she'll be fine.

 

ouch, good luck with that climb. going up to the bay area from san luis obispo, i have to climb cuesta grade... get honks all the time for going as slow as the truckers who won't let me change over into their lane.... enjoy the SD weather though!!

 

we drove the xA from Los Angeles to San Francisco and got around 37mpg. It wasn't a very fun ride other than paying less for gas. The lack of cruise control is extremely obvious and the contiunal drag trying to keep speed through the hills in a 1.5ltr is straining. The seats aren't comfortable for long trips, at least to heavier people.

it wasn't as fun on road trips as I thought it would be

 

Try, on the gas pedal to instead of having your foot facing straight forward, or even to the outside, try to turn it inside so it's facing your other foot a _little_, like you're trying to point your toes together. According to Kungfu this has your body's meridians lined up, and is stronger for less effort, leverage wise.

I practice Wingchun kungfu and used this technique, and it made not having cruise control at least tolerable.

Also I took frequent rest-stop breaks, and tried not to drive more than 400-500 miles a day. It made the trip more surviveable.

 

I just put on about 3500 miles going to Utah and back a few weeks ago. Hoping for better gas mileage, but I was hauling Yakima bars and a Thule Sidekick cargo box. Even at 60 mph with the '06 automatic, going into the wind gave maybe 30-35 mpg. Crossing Colorado saw 40 mpg a few times.

I had no problems with mountain climbing, meaning I knew I was in a lightly powered, heavily loaded car. The grades weren't steep enough to trigger the sustained downshift mode, so I regularly had to thumb off the O/D.

With cruise control, I kept comfortable except for a few days when the only stops were for gas. Getting out to stretch a bit helped.

We also traveled with three cats! They had a box in back, plenty of food and water, and slept most of the time. One chose right in front of the instrument cluster as her favorite spot. One of the rascals had us searching a rest stop for almost an hour, thinking she had gotten out. We finally found her up under the dashboard - she climbed up around the steering column and was perched somewhere between the heater box and the defrost vents! Here she is (reluctantly) coming back down:

 

haha i was like, what the crap?! took me like 3 tries to understand what you were saying after being in disbelief of what you had tried to say hahaha. i bet it's good solid advice though.

 

LMAO @ the cat! fugeelama, is your car manual or auto? Is it ok to do a roadtrip in a manual xA at 70mph, which would meen around 4000rpms for multiple hours. Is that ok for the engine?

 

fugeelama,

be glad you aren't driving a Mini Cooper up those mountains! Our xA is far more capable on hills than the Mini was, presumably because of the gearing.

Of course crusing in the Mini at 2500rpm was nice...

 

iyzmi: it's a manual. I test drove an auto xA two years ago and didn't like how the shift-points felt. Anyways, I have no doubt that our little cars will handle a cross country trip loaded down with an extra 300-400 pounds of stuff. Sometimes I worry about the constantly "high" RPMs but that's what our little 1NZ-FEs are designed to do!

 

Yeah, the RPM's are what Im worried about while doin 65-80mph on long trips...

 

toyota does very extensive and extreme testing i've seen videos of engine production.

 

Really? You got a link to those vids?

 

part of some of my classes involved watching vidoes and one of the engine test was they randomly pull an engine from line like one a month then run it at full throttle for 24/7 for a week i think. manifolds can get red hot from the heat. then they tear it down to make sure there nothing went wrong inside the engine.

 

yeah, our engines are extremely resillient. Went up to North Jersey from MD for 4 hours straight at 75-100 MPH, no problems. That was in my auto. My manual gets a road trip next weekend.