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Spore. Beer Pong. Flight of the Conchords. Superpoking on Facebook. Any of these sound remotely familiar? If not, it's because you're old and unhip. These terms belong in the vernacular of a specific subset of the American populace.
Whether you call them Gen Y, Echo Boomers, or Millennials, they're the next generation of young drivers and car buyers-and they are different from you and me. They grew up not on Atari or Commodore64, nor even Nintendo or SEGA, but on PlayStation and Xbox. They Google, Yelp, and Twitter -- often while simultaneously LOLing on IM or downloading the latest iPhone apps. See? Unhip.
Toyota is not only a student of this generation, it's at the head of the class when it comes to identifying and codifying their existence. Toyota wrote the playbook back in 2004, when it launched the Scion brand and unleashed the xA and xB twins. Four years later, when Scion replaced the xA with xD and brought a larger, more powerful xB to market, it was regarded as the auto industry's most successful youth brand.
Naturally other auto manufacturers, like Kia and Nissan, took notice, particularly as the xB became the poster box of Scion's youth-targeted movement. So are their new boxy offerings CliffsNotes versions of the xB, merely clever cribbed summaries based on Scion source material? That's what we aim to find out.
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