Cars.com's Kelsey Mays takes you through the 2008 Scion xD.
Transcript
(jaunty music) Hi, I'm Kelsey Mays for cars.com, and this is the 2008 Scion XD. Now, Scion is a division of Toyota aimed at young hip people, like me, except I use words like hip, so I'm probably off the list.
Now, the XD replaces last year's XA and it retains the same sort of hatchback proportions with a more stylized front end. There's also more power under the hood and more standard features. And the best thing of all is that the XD still starts under $15,000. Now, even though this is a small car on the outside, I've got enough room on the inside. The seat is positioned a little bit high and it doesn't have a height adjustment. And so for me, the windshield is a little bit low and I'm about six feet tall. Otherwise, there's plenty of standard features. I mean, you have standard power windows, remote keyless entry, a CD player, and even steering wheel audio controls. The dashboard has a nice textured feel to it, which does pretty well covering up the fact that it's cheap, hard plastic. Otherwise, probably the cheapest thing inside are the climate controls. They kind of rattle around as you turn them. And we've seen better from a lot of other Toyotas. The stereo is a standard Pioneer unit. It's got six speakers and it's got pretty good bass quality. One thing we don't like is that the power button is all the way up here and you have to turn it on and off there instead of pressing the volume knob, which pretty much just only works the volume now. There's also a specific input for MP3 players and a port for iPods. The instrument panel positions, the speedometer on the left and the tachometer on the right. It's kind of a cool setup, but it takes a little bit of time to get used to. Now, one thing you'll notice is a pretty significant blind spot. This car put some style over substance, so the rear window isn't that big and the roof pillar at the end there is kinda chunky. Fortunately, this is a pretty small car, so changing lanes is still pretty easy. Now, the roofline stays pretty high all the way to the back, so I've got plenty of headroom. You can see this is where I would drive, and leg room is a little bit tight. Fortunately, the seats recline and go back about 10 inches. And when they're back, I've got tons of leg room. Pop the hatch, and there's a fair amount of cargo room in back. Now, obviously the seats move forward a little bit, but when they do, there's a little bit of a gap right here that can catch some of your smaller stuff. Now, there are a couple flaps that flip up and create a new wall so that stuff doesn't fall into the gap. The problem is, with these flaps up, there really isn't any more room, whether you put the seat forward or back. If you wanna flip the seat down, you can do so by just pulling this lever and the whole thing goes down into a flat load floor. One thing to note is that when the seats are in their backward position, they don't fold completely flat, as you can see. There's a little gap right there. You have to first move them into their forward position and then fold down so that you get the flat load floor. Now, overall gas mileage is about 28, 29 miles per gallon. That's about on par with the Nissan Versa. A Honda Fit's a little better, a Dodge Caliber's a little worse. This car is a lot of fun to drive and it's got tons of features and a low starting price. In our book, that makes it a pretty good buy. <v Narrator>For additional information on this car or any other, go to cars.com and our blog, KickingTires.
