Driving a slow car fast is better than driving a fast car slow.
Don’t get me wrong, the Scion FR-S is by no means slow, but in comparison to a Mustang GT, Camaro SS, Challenger Hellcat or Tesla Model S, it has no hope of keeping up. But I have absolutely no issue with that. In fact, that is precisely what makes this car so damn appealing. At 200 hp, the FR-S has more than enough grunt to get around and have tons of fun without resorting to the type of antisocial behavior that’s likely to get you thrown behind behind bars or worse.
Cars hold a strange place in our lives. For most people, they are the second most expensive purchase they will make after a house. Many of us depend on them for personal mobility in modern life. But in many ways, cars are frequently the least rational big-ticket purchase we’ll make. If we were at all rational in choosing cars, we’d all be driving either a Prius or a minivan. There would be no SUVs or sports cars and only contractors would drive pickup trucks. But we are irrational creatures that buy cars for emotional reasons; the way they appeal to our eyes when we see them, the thrill we get from the roar of the engine, the rush we get from the acceleration.
Every product is ultimately the answer to a question asked somewhere along the course of developing that product. When evaluating a product, you have to consider at least two things, how well does it answer the original question and is that question even remotely relevant to me?
As a car and technology enthusiast and an engineer at heart, I’ve always appreciated the idea of building stuff that was better, faster, more efficient at doing what it needs to do. I dig the idea of big, comfy five passenger car that can silently launch effortlessly to 60 mph in three seconds. I marvel at the sound a Corvette or GT350 makes at full-throttle. I’m amazed at how far a Toyota Prius can travel on a single gallon of gasoline.
Yet while I love the golden age we live in where engines are capable of generating more 450-hp and cruising on the highway at almost 30 mpg all while producing almost unmeasurably low emissions, there is something slightly unsatisfying about driving either a Corvette or a Model S. You see, I don’t live next to a drag strip or a country club race track. I live in a residential neighborhood near kids and schools and dogs. Whether the car runs on refined petroleum or electrons, those marvelous attributes are unusable and every time I get behind the wheel of such a car, I feel like I can’t use it to its potential.
This is where a car like my old 2005 Mustang V6 or the 2016 Scion FR-S come into the picture. Each has more than adequate performance so that it doesn’t feel like a 1960s that can barely get out of its own way. Yet the limits of that performance are not so high that they cannot be explored in a relatively responsible way.
The Scion is the product of a collaboration between Toyota and Subaru that the latter sells as the BR-Z and Toyota sells as the GT86 in other parts of the world. Subaru was responsible for the powertrain and chassis and thus this car is powered by a variant of one of that company’s boxer engines, in this case a 2.0-liter four with two pairs of horizontally opposed cylinders. Toyota has added some of its technology too with its D-4S fuel injection that includes both a port and direct injector for each cylinder. The result is 200-hp at 7,000-rpm and 151 lb.-ft. of torque that peaks at 6,400 rpm.
While that torque peak seems relatively lofty, in typical Subaru fashion, the engine feels quite tractable throughout its speed range. Driving around town, the FR-S never really felt like it was lacking in low to mid-range grunt. While the boxer engine makes only a little less power and torque than the 2.2-liter engine in the dearly departed Honda S2000, it couldn’t have a more different character from the Honda. The S2000 powerplant would happily spin up to nearly 9,000 rpm with just a tap of the throttle, while boxer builds rotational velocity at a much more deliberate pace. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just different.
The other unique characteristic of this engine is the sound it makes. Unlike the scream you can extract from a high-revving engine, four and six-cylinder boxer engines like those built by Subaru and Porsche all have a distinctive note that is low and rumbly, quite unlike anything else on the road. It comes as a result of the engine layout that has cylinders firing on one bank and then the other and I quite like it.
The FR-S I drove had the standard six-speed manual as all proper sports cars should although a six-speed automatic is also available for those that can’t quite master using the left foot while driving. The suspension is fairly basic but effective with MacPherson struts handling the front wheels and a double wishbone holding up the back of the car. The 11.6-inch front rotors aren’t huge but with a curb weight of under 2,800-pounds they are up to the task and the pedal feel was outstanding.
Yes this back seat is pointless
The design of the FR-S isn’t groundbreaking, but neither does it do much of anything wrong. The proportions are just right for a compact sports car with a relatively long hood and short rear deck although it probably could have been a bit better if they decided to forgo the pointless back seat and moved the cabin back a couple more inches.
Modern cars often seem packed to the gills with technology of all sorts, much of which is of dubious benefit but helps to pad the feature checklist for competitive comparisons. Virtually none of that is present in this car. There is no lane departure or blindspot warning, no dual zone climate control and no navigation. There are two wonderfully supportive sport seats that will hold a driver and passenger firmly in position during spirited driving. That seat will keep the driver directly in front of the thick-rimmed steering wheel which is devoid of any switchgear for the audio system or anything else. A trio of stalks behind the wheel provide the turn signal, wipers/lights and the non-adaptive cruise control.
A nice simple radio with a rotary volume control
The center stack contains a relatively basic radio with a touchscreen and rotary volume knob. It does have bluetooth streaming support so you can play whatever you want from your phone but there’s no CD player, navigation or any other fancy nonsense. Below that are three rotary knobs to manage airflow direction, temperature and fan speed and that’s it. Nothing fancy, but utterly functional. Exactly what a sports car should have and nothing more.
The lever for the six-speed is perfectly positioned to fall to hand when you lower it from the steering wheel and offers only minimal resistance when changing gears through its precisely defined gates. Behind the shifter there is a traction control off switch and another for VSC sport mode that allows more slip.
The grey numbers in the speedometer and background pattern make it very hard to read
The instrument cluster is dominated by a large white faced tach in the center with fuel and temperature gauges to the right and speedometer to the left. One of the few really questionable design choices lies with that speedometer. The background of the two outer gauges is silkscreened with what looks like a snakeskin pattern, but whereas the left gauges use bright white markings that contrast with the pattern, the digits on the speedo are more of a grey that is distinctly difficult to read. Fortunately, there is a secondary digital speed readout in the tach.
There is a back seat but it would be snug even for a child and with the seat set for my five-foot-ten frame, there was no usable legroom. I would like to see automakers that insist on installing a rear seat in small coupes like this at least offer a delete option to save some weight.
17-inches is more than enough tire for this car
It was good to see that the Toyota and Subaru designers and marketers didn’t insist on installing oversized 19 or 20-inch alloy wheels strictly for stylistic purposes. Instead the FR-S rides on 17-inch alloys with 215/45R17 Bridgestone Turanzas. That tire size provides a good balance of grip while still being able to slide at reasonable speeds. The result is that you can take this car through the twisty stuff at speeds where you can explore the car’s limits without instantly being considered a menace to society.
On an unseasonably warm and sunny mid-November afternoon, the only thing that would have made the FR-S more fun would be a folding top, but that’s not available and it appears that Toyota and Subaru have no intention of producing a convertible. The FR-S feels nicely balanced and has enough grunt to pull reasonably hard out of a turn before applying the firm brake pedal going into the next. With the stability control in sport mode and gearbox in a low enough gear to keep the engine in the heart of the torque curve, you can bring the tail out a bit, but you’d have to do something really dumb to get into serious trouble on dry pavement.
The only real dynamic complaint I had about the FR-S is the damping setup that seemed just a bit off. Short, sharp impacts like frost heaves were adequately absorbed but on certain roads such as the stretch of paved concrete that comprises I-94 between Ann Arbor and Detroit Metro Airport, there is a low-frequency sinusoidal pattern that makes the car feel just a bit bouncy. It wasn’t too terribly objectionable for a 15-mile stretch but it could get a bit more unpleasant over a longer distance. On the other hand, it’s a good excuse to get off the interstate and find a more scenic route to your destination.
The EPA officially rates the manual transmission FR-S at 22 mpg city, 30 mpg highway and 25 mpg combined. The automatic bumps those numbers to 25, 34 and 28 mpg respectively. Normally, I’d compare my real world results to the ratings here, but frankly I was having too much fun to really care. As tested, my sample car cost a quite reasonable $26,075 delivered and
I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend that anyone looking for an affordable sports car with a rigid roof check this one out. It’s obviously not completely rational, but it’s not entirely irrational either. The engine’s got character and adequate go-juice and the chassis more than up to the task of letting you exercise your heel-toe and trail-braking chops without getting thrown behind bars.
Click here for full specifications of the 2016 Scion FR-S
