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" By now, you&amp;#039;ve heard the news. Scion is dead. That&amp;#039;s no great surprise. The brand, launched in 2003, has been faltering for years now. Scion&amp;#039;s 2015 sales totaled less than a third of what it achieved in its most successful year\u2014173,000 vehicles, a high-water mark the brand\u00A0set in 2006 and never came close to approaching again.\u00A0 There are plenty of reasons why Scion fell flat. Some of them were beyond Toyota&amp;#039;s control: The brand, aimed at first-time car buyers, had barely gotten its footing when the U.S. economy tanked. Add the crippling college debt and shaky job prospects that so many of Toyota&amp;#039;s young, hip target customers faced, and you&amp;#039;ve got a recipe for unimpressive sales. But Scion&amp;#039;s trajectory wasn&amp;#039;t helped by the fact that its most memorable offering was the first car it ever sold. Try it: Think of a Scion, any Scion. I&amp;#039;ll bet you a bag of chips\u00A0you&amp;#039;re thinking of the original xB. The refrigerator-like first-gen\u00A0xB debuted along with the Scion nameplate in 2003. It was the exact perfect vehicle for the brand: Quirky and funky enough to stand out from the inoffensive blandmobiles first-time buyers could afford, and at a starting price under $15,000, able to undercut many of them on sticker. Compare the genuinely cool xB to Toyota&amp;#039;s previous attempt at cheap mobility, the painfully frumpy Echo. The difference is astounding.\u00A0 And it worked, albeit briefly. Scion sales surpassed 150,000 in 2005, the brand&amp;#039;s third year in existence. The much more\u00A0conventional\u00A0two-door tC was the most popular model of Scion&amp;#039;s three-car lineup; the lumpen xA only\u00A0sold enough to justify its existence through 2006. But the car that did the most work for Scion&amp;#039;s image, both in advertisements and in street cred, was the xB.\u00A0 Tuners loved the xB&amp;#039;s unrepentant uprightness. Serious customizers used the little brick as a platform for all kinds of outlandishness; wannabes raided Scion&amp;#039;s factory-supplied upgrade catalogue to create all kinds of warranty-friendly variations on the xB theme. The plucky little crate never approached the ubiquity of, say, the air-cooled Volkswagen, but the first-generation xB&amp;#039;s\u00A0utterly unique styling meant you couldn&amp;#039;t mistake it for anything it competed with.        You couldn&amp;#039;t mistake it for the second-gen design that replaced it for the 2008 model year, either. Much was said about how badly the redesigned xB missed the mark when it came out, and opinions haven&amp;#039;t improved much since then. The market didn&amp;#039;t love it, either\u2014while Scion sold more than 61,000 first-generation xBs in 2006, for most of its tenure on the market the redesigned xB wasn&amp;#039;t able to surpass 20,000 annual sales.\u00A0 Toyota&amp;#039;s inability to carry the funky image of the original xB into a new, improved product is a pretty damning symptom of the Scion brand&amp;#039;s failure, if not an outright cause of it. The original xB was a somewhat hasty rebadge of a car Toyota already sold in Japan, and it was magical; the second-generation model was designed specifically as a Scion, in reaction to the things Toyota thought Scion buyers wanted, and it was a dud.  I can&amp;#039;t think of another automaker whose Version 1.0 offering so thoroughly defines its\u00A0legacy. Imagine\u00A0how many branding specialist heads would roll if the word &amp;quot;Infiniti&amp;quot; was automatically associated with the two-door M30, sold between 1989 and 1992. Think of\u00A0how boned Elon Musk would be if the first car that sprung to mind when you mentioned Tesla Motors was the Roadster.\u00A0 The &amp;quot;sophomore slump&amp;quot; is an aggravating cliche, whether it&amp;#039;s applied to professional athletes or breakout bands whose second albums never quite live up to the magic of their first. But sadly, it truly does apply in the short, slightly sad saga of Scion. We can argue all day about the genesis of this phenomenon\u2014whether Scion was doomed by Toyota&amp;#039;s lack of ambition, the marketing department&amp;#039;s short-sightedness, a rocky economy, the rise of Uber, social media, or whatever else we&amp;#039;re blaming failure on today.\u00A0 But it&amp;#039;s damned hard to build a legacy when your most memorable product is a 13-year-old box. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a28093/scion-xb-only-memorable-car/>