Review Of Scion FR-S - Toyota is one of the largest car manufacturers in the world. Subaru is a small plucky company that specializes in all-wheel-drive. Put them together and you get the 2016 Scion FR-S. It is a sports car that is fun, inexpensive and unlike anything else. The engine under the hood is a four-cylinder 2.0 liter engine. It is a Boxer motor and as the logo shows, they're designed and built by Subaru. Now, it does include direct injection and also has variable valve timing. What that results in is a car that puts out 200 horsepower but still gets 30 miles to the gallon on the freeway. Now it's connected to the rear wheels through a Torsen limited-slip differential, which means that this car should be a heck of a lot of fun. One of the problems with most sports cars is the lack of a usable trunk. This one's not too bad. You have to use the key to open it and inside you have enough room for a couple duffel bags, a suitcase, maybe a camera case, couple of soccer balls and not much more. Need more room? and you can push down, and you get a full pass through, that is actually amazingly useful. We carry with us a lot of production gear, including a slider that's in a large gun case, several camera bags, and other miscellaneous stuff like tripods. We fit it all in here, which is pretty amazing actually. Inside you get these just fantastic seats.
So immediately looking at the gauge cluster I can see that this car is all business, because in the middle: tachometer, front and center. On the left you have your speedo, on the right you have your fuel gauge, but it is all about the tach, and keeping the car under that 7500 rpm redline. Now the interior design of this car is pretty sparse, it's designed around a sports car idea, which means that everything you want to do involves the wheel and the gear shift. Ooh, the gear shift. That is a fantastic gear shift! You can get this with an automatic, but honestly, why? The stick is magnificent, it has reverse up off first, it has all six gears and all six gears are useable. It's not like you have one, two, three and a bunch of cruising gears. These are all very useful gears in this car. The fanciest thing is this car is probably the Pioneer touch screen. This provides me with my AM/FM/Aha audio, all the standard audio fare, and it also acts as a rear view camera when I'm in my reverse gear. That's now a standard feature on the 2016 model.
Moving down, we have air con, which is your traditional dials, this really hasn't changed much over the previous years of this car. Further down we have a USB socket which ties into the Pioneer head unit, moving even further we have the fun buttons. This is where the stuff really gets exciting because we have a VSC sport defeat here, this turns off traction control enough to get the back out but without risking your life. Not for public street use. For track only, or closed courses. But it's a lot of fun if you can one of those available to you. And then on the left we have complete traction control off. The only reason you'd want complete traction control off is if you are a pro driver, you're doing some serious drifting, or if you're in super icy conditions and you need to have that spin on the wheels. And that is pretty much it, it's a sports car! There's not a lot of bells and whistles. The real fun is on the road. Every once in a while, a car comes along that defies logic. People will say it's not big enough or not powerful enough or not cheap enough.
But when you actually drive the FR-S, all those very logical complaints go out the window. That's not to say the FR-S is totally impractical. Hardly. The EPA rating of 30 mpg highway and 22 city is actually very reasonable. Now I have tried to fit a family of four in here and it was not a comfortable situation, as you can see, I can hardly fit myself into the back. The back seats are small by any standard and should only be considered for emergency use only. But in a car this small, that can hardly be surprising. The model I'm driving today includes the optional TRD exhaust, intake, and rear sway bar. These add to the cost, but do provide the most common aftermarket upgrades without voiding the warranty. And if you like a throaty exhaust, you'll love this TRD one. And that's the 2016 Scion FR-S. Thanks for read Review Of Scion FR-S.
