2013 Scion FR-S: A Grown-Up Play Date
March 5, 2013
My longtime friend and fellow car enthusiast Albert pulls up next to me in his Honda S2000 and examines our long-term 2013 Scion FR-S.
"Red is my least favorite color but I would still trade my car for that any day of the week," he says. "Damn, that thing is clean."
Our friend Ian arrives in his Hyundai Genesis 2.0T R-Spec coupe and we take off for a Sunday morning drive. I was on a spirited jaunt with friends, but I couldn't help to think, "Which one of these would I want to own?"
2013 Scion FR-S: Broken Shift Knob Cap
March 1, 2013
The shift knob for the six-speed manual transmission in our long-term 2013 Scion FR-S is one of my least favorite parts of the interior. I just don't like the feel of leather and plastic while shifting.
Luckily, the cap broke off in my hand today. It was easy to pop back in to place, but it still feels loose and flimsy. Maybe it'll be a good excuse to start shopping for weighted, metal replacements. What would you replace it with?
Travis Langness, Associate Editor @ 14,010 miles
2013 Scion FR-S: Not Faking the Funk
February 28, 2013
I love the wheels on our 2013 Scion FR-S. The Volk Racing TE37SLs and the Yokohama Advan ADO8 tires that they're wrapped in are two of my favorite aftermarket products. The ADO8s are a little loud and will wear down quicker than the stock tires on daily commutes, but they're sticky and I'm on board with that. There is something, however, that I can't stand about these wheels.
2013 Scion FR-S: These Wheels Are Great, But I'd Keep the Stock Set at the Ready
February 19, 2013
There's no denying that our long-term 2013 Scion FR-S has a great stance with its Volk Racing wheels and stickier Yokohama Advan Neova AD08 tires we put on it. I love that it still has meaty sidewalls, too. And if you read our latest Track Tested and watched the track video, you know it has a ton more grip.
This is absolutely the wheel/tire package I'd want if I was going to use FR-S for track days, as Jay Kavanagh has, because this is exactly what you're supposed to do with this car after all.
2013 Scion FR-S: One of the Year's 10 Least Expensive Coupes
February 15, 2013
Sometimes you have to make a few compromises to save a few bucks. But there are cases in which you don't, and the Scion FR-S represents one such example. The coupe nabbed a place on our recent top 10 list of the year's least expensive coupes.
While the FR-S isn't heavy on luxury or space, it offers abundant style and is loads of fun to drive. And with a starting price of just $24,500, you don't have to break the bank to get your jollies. Sounds like a good proposition to us.
Warren Clarke, Automotive Content Editor
2013 Scion FR-S: Lock Your Trunk?
February 14, 2013
I can't remember the last time I locked the trunk of any car, and in the case of our long-term 2013 Scion FR-S, I'd be way more concerned about someone making off with the entire car rather than any one of my worldly possessions in the trunk.
If you want to lock the trunk of an FR-S (or a BRZ), you'll have to fumble around a bit to find the out-of-sight keyhole in the lid. I guess the location is kind of a hassle if you actually do need to use it regularly, but I like its hidden location because it makes for a cleaner design in back. This near total rejection of extraneous clutter is one of the things that make the Scion-Subaru twins so appealing to me.
2013 Scion FR-S: Dog Hair Be Gone
February 13, 2013
This weekend I had to take my dog Mya back to the vet in our 2013 Scion FR-S. I put her doggy blanket down in the backseat like I usually do to protect the seat but her hair still managed to get on the cloth. When I took the car to the car wash for its weekly wash and afterward pointed out to the attendant handing me the key of the "clean" car that they didn't clean the backseat, he said that they couldn't and that it had to be shampooed.
2013 Scion FR-S: FR-S Brotherhood
February 12, 2013
Last night when I pulled up to the valet in our 2013 Scion FR-S at the fancy Fairmont Santa Monica hotel, the valet guy excitedly told me how I had "his car." The exact red and everything, well, minus the exhaust. He continued to go on and on about how he likes to race it up at Buttonwillow. Sometimes he even drifts it. Needless to say, I was impressed. Not very often in L.A. that you meet a guy with a fun car who actually knows how to drive it.
Caroline Pardilla, Deputy Managing Editor
2013 Scion FR-S: My Kind of Sports Car
February 11, 2013
After scoring a couple of driving stints in our long-term SLS AMG, I was grateful to get behind the wheel of our 2013 Scion FR-S. Driving a quarter-million-dollar sports car around L.A. is too stressful for me. I'm too afraid to switch lanes, I dare not park it on the street (valet all the time), plus the SLS spotlight is too bright for me.
But our FR-S is more my speed: fun and affordable. Now, I realize there's no way these cars would ever be shopped together but it made me realize that I'm just not an SLS kind of girl. THAT kind of girl wouldn't worry about her beautiful car getting dinged because if it ever did she could afford to get it fixed or replaced.
2013 Scion FR-S: Oversensitive Airbag Sensor
February 8, 2013
You see that purse? Sometimes it sets off the airbag sensor in our 2013 Scion FR-S. That's not usually a big deal to me since sometimes I load it up with heavy stuff. But when this particular not-so-heavy one, combined with my smartphone, set off the sensor telling me to buckle them in, I threw the purse in the footwell and left the smartphone on the seat. Oddly enough, the car continued to tell me to buckle my phone in, and urgently, so I put it in the center storage cubby to shut it up.
2013 Scion FR-S: Track Day Road Trip, Part IV
February 7, 2013
It was a gamble. I had checked the forecast regularly in the days leading up to our Laguna Seca track weekend, and the outlook was consistently dismal. So much so that there was no sense bothering with high-performance brake pads. Normally, this is the second thing you change for a track outing in an otherwise stock car, the first being tires. So, I left the stock brake pads on our long-term 2013 Scion FR-S.
And as you've seen, the track was sopping wet. I felt vindicated in my decision to be apathetic.
Then the sun came out. And a dry line began to form on the track surface. And for a time, pretty much the whole track dried out. The twitchy, traction-devoid, edgy FR-S I knew in the rain made way for a far different animal. These Yokohama Advan AD08 tires rule in the dry. Communicative, beautifully progressive breakaway, heaps of grip. Exit speeds climbed. Braking points were adjusted.
It took roughly two hot laps in the dry for the brakes to go limp. The braking power underfoot just went into the ether as the overheated stock pads' coefficient of friction dropped like a rock. If you had told me that you'd secretly swapped my brake pads with sintered Folger's coffee grounds, I'd have believed you.
2013 Scion FR-S: Fuel Economy Update for January
February 4, 2013
For the month of January, we only filled our 2013 Scion FR-S twice but in December because editor JayKav took the car up on a road trip to Laguna Seca and then to Oregon it logged a lot of highway miles. In case you were curious, it got 11.2 and 12.2 mpg during the track days.
On the Oregon roadtrip, the best mpg he got was 30 mpg and the trip to and from Oregon averaged 28.2 mpg.
For January, the FR-S was driven for 560.9 miles and drank 23.2 gallons of 91 octane fuel, averaging 24.2 mpg, a bit shy of the EPA's combined 25 mpg.
Caroline Pardilla, Deputy Managing Editor
Worst Fill MPG: 16.9
Best Fill MPG: 30.0
Average Lifetime MPG: 24.2
EPA MPG Rating (City/Highway Combined): 25
Best Range: 335.1 miles
Current Odometer: 13,108 miles
2013 Scion FR-S: Track Day Road Trip, Part III
February 1, 2013
Drivers' meetings are important and necessary. And they should take no more than fifteen minutes. Longer than this means the organizer just likes the sound of his own voice.
I bring this up because the 45-minute drivers' meeting at our Laguna Seca track day left exactly four minutes to get ready to be on track. This brings up another point: If you're going to have eternity-long drivers' meetings, you should schedule the beginner group to be on track first. Newbies don't have nearly the prep time requirements of non-beginner groups.
2013 Scion FR-S: Track Day Road Trip, Part II
January 28, 2013
Up until this point in its existence, our long-term 2013 Scion FR-S had only seen dry days. Life in SoCal has its benefits. This trip (part one here) would be the first time we'd find out how its more aggressive tires on wider wheels would fare in wet conditions.
But we'd gotten such a late start heading out of Los Angeles (plus the stops for photos, food and a visit to Sampson Communications to troubleshoot some equipment) that night had fallen by the time we'd peeled off Route 33 onto Highway 58. Fie, daylight savings. Now it's wet, cold and dark. It was quite likely that the soft compound of these Yokohama AD08s wouldn't have much bite on this, one of southern California's best driving roads.
This road, it turned out, was deceptive. Grip was admirable given the slip-prone conditions, and the FR-S continued to impress as a pointy, feedback-rich tool for driving. I love this car. Equally surprising was the pace Bitter Dan was able to maintain in his Exige, shod as it was on rather worn R-compounds. I would later find out just how I'd been tricked by Highway 58.
2013 Scion FR-S: Two Coupes Enter...
January 24, 2013
But does one coupe have to leave?
Scion has these two coupes. One, the tC, is essentially a two door Corolla with a flash interior. It's front-wheel drive and seems more likely to be turned into a mobile disco than a canyon carver. The FR-S however, is a coupe that seems to be at the forefront of saving not only Toyota's image but the idea of an affordable rear-drive car altogether.
Can Scion afford to have these two diametrically opposed coupes sitting side by side in a showroom? Does the existence of one take away from the purpose of the other?
If you were Scion, what would you do?
Kurt Niebuhr, Photo Editor @ 12,512 miles
2013 Scion FR-S: Wind It Out
January 21, 2013
The Scion's Multi-Information Display shows only a handful of parameters, including outside temperature, current fuel consumption, average fuel consumption and the engine speed at which the rev indicator turns on, complete with buzzing alert (this is in addition to the regular odometer and trip meter that also share the screen space). You can customize the alert to display/sound between 2,000 and 7,400 rpm.
Whether by default or someone on staff changed it, it shouldn't surprise you where ours is set.
Dan Frio, Automotive Editor @ 12,500 miles
2013 Scion FR-S: This Shifts Better
January 18, 2013
There's a difference between the shift feels in our BRZ and FR-S. It's subtle, but it exists. The FR-S six-speed simply engages its six forward gears more smoothly than the BRZ, with less clunk and resistance from the gearbox. In theory, we shouldn't be experiencing this since both cars share the same transmission.
This article from our long-time pal SubyTrojan doesn't shed much light on why we (or maybe just I) feel a difference. Maybe it's as simple as a difference in trans fluid. But it's an interesting analysis, nerdish on the powertrain details and on the development of the new transmission that sprung from the ashes of the old Lexus IS200 gearbox.
Dan Frio, Automotive Editor @ 12,500 miles
2013 Scion FR-S: Track Day Road Trip, Part I
January 15, 2013
Several weeks ago, I took our long-term 2013 Scion FR-S to Laguna Seca raceway for a weekend of berms, apices and brake markers. It's an annual thing, this Laguna track weekend, and last time I chronicled the trip in several installments all bearing the title "The Beauty of Dual-Purpose Cars," in the Miata section of the Long-Term Updates. My esteemed colleague Kurt Niebuhr saddled up in Project Miata this time.
There's a lot of green (to adopt the parlance of billiards) between Edmunds HQ and Laguna Seca. Decided to make the most of it and take the bitchinest roads possible that roughly connect between the two points. So that's what we did. The collective "we" being the two of us and my friends (and Eyesore Racing co-conspirators) Bitter Dan in his Lotus Exige and Sarah in her ridonkulously clean Nissan 240SX.
One wrinkle on the voyage northwards: rain. Lots and lots (and lots!) of rain. No big deal. It had no bearing on our selected route but slowed us down a bit. The first portion of our path took us north on 101 until we peeled off on 33 in Ojai. This is one hell of a road, and the FR-S is just such a perfect car for it. It's so communicative that you can drive hard (with conditions in mind) in complete confidence.
Deep into the drive on 33 I found an oddity. I'd hear a chime-chime-chime from time to time, which makes a rhyme, I have a dime...anyway, the chime wasn't related to any particular driving style, nor were any new lights illuminated in the cluster, nor did the car drive any differently. Nonetheless, I slowed down and put the senses one click higher. Miles and miles later I realized what was causing the intermittent chime. It was the passenger seatbelt chime. Turns out that the light jacket and a half-eaten bag of dried fruit sitting on the passenger seat was enough weight to drip the seatbelt alert. Why this took some 100 miles to finally occur I have no idea.
More to come.
Jason Kavanagh, Engineering Editor
2013 Scion FR-S: ECM Service Campaign
January 11, 2013
We received a mailer from Scion citing a service campaign open for some 2013 Scion FR-S vehicles. The quick summary is that, "On certain early 2013 Scion FR-S vehicles, the OBD II System may need to be updated..." The ECM update prevents a check engine light that may otherwise illuminate under certain abnormal conditions.
Owners are instructed to visit their dealer for the ECM recalibration. Since the urgency is low, we'll likely wait until our next routine maintenance to have the issue addressed.
Mike Schmidt, Vehicle Testing Manager @ 12,500 miles
