Remember the Toyota Echo? In other parts of the world, they were the first generation of the Yaris, and in still other places, they were known as the comical-sounding Platz. Because it sounds like plotz. And perhaps you’ll consider plotzing like I did when I show you this Echo I happened to see, which, thanks to the inspired and unexpected addition of a big bull bar, may be the most badass Echo still buzzing down the streets of this great and complex nation of ours.
Before I get into talking about this particular Echo, it’s worth talking Echoes themselves, because they were interesting little cars. The Echo, which shared most of its mechanicals with the Scions xA and xB and the Toyota WiLL Vi, was built between 1999 and 2005, and was part of a plan by Toyota to recruit more young buyers to the brand, much like what Toyota was hoping their Scion sub-brand would do in 2003.
And, like Scion, the Echo seemed to do the opposite of what their builders wanted, attracting older buyers instead of younger ones, but those older buyers were very loyal and appreciative of this little car’s charms.
Here’s some commercials that show how desperately Toyota wanted The Youths to buy some Echos:
Those swirly colors, that birds-eye-view photography angle, once a MySpace selfie staple, those were all how one tried to lure kids into spending their money in the early 2000s.
This next commercial featured the famous Arecibo Radio Telescope, which, as you likely remember, was what pretty much everyone under 30 who was looking for a cheap car in America was obsessed with:
The Echo had a pretty novel design, being unusually tall for its length, giving it a kind of endearing, cartoonish look.
There was a coupé version as well as a four-door, and I always thought these had a friendly sort of charm. Maybe that’s why when I saw an Echo – a rare sight to see at all these days – on the road wearing a full bull bar bumper setup, it caught my attention.
It looks either like a geeky kid wearing an unfortunate orthodontic headgear or a scrappy pug armored up and ready for a fight. Personally, I love the dichotomy of this chubby little subcompact wearing that huge add-on bumper setup. It feels just a bit unhinged, in a good way.
Oh, and as an aside, look how nicely this character line defines the amber reflector area of the side marker lamp:
That’s just a nice little touch.
So, what is this person doing with their echo that they need it fitted with such a battering ram? Did they, like me, smack into too many deer? Because I considered what a bull bar might look like on my Pao after I hit a second deer in the car:
I didn’t do it, though, but this Echo owner certainly did. That bull bar on the Echo has big rubberized push bars/bumper guards, which makes me wonder if this car may be used to move things around somewhere? Or maybe the owner just likes sending shopping carts skittering around parking lots at wild speeds, like pinballs, just for fun.
There are a few dents in that Echo’s hood that suggest maybe there were some, uh, incidents, that brought this on.
Maybe they’re tired of hitting deer. Or hoping to hit more deer. I hope it’s just deer, at least. Or tired of being intimidated by bigger cars. Maybe this little Echo is just ready to take on whatever the world throws at it, and it is equipped accordingly, with substantial front-end protection and one lone cyclopean yellow foglamp?
Whatever the reason, I think it makes this Echo look and feel pretty badass, and I salute you, armored Echo driver!
This doesn’t seem like a particularly high bar to clear, if we’re being honest.
I actually had a Toyota Echo! They are incredibly underrated.
Happys:
-They are relatively unkillable. Very few things will kill one of these cars.
-Shocking amount of storage room. Dual gloveboxes, tray under the passenger seat. Even had a 3rd cupholder!
-The fuel economy. My Gawd. I averaged 40mpg CITY!
-Center speedometer. It was proven to reduce eye strain.
-The Headroom. The bubble shape really helped here.
-The trunk room. It could swallow a family of 4’s suitcases. Bigger cars (such as the 8th gen Civic) couldn’t compete here.
-A ton of cross compatibility with Scion XB, XA
Crappys:
-Not many of these cars had any creature comforts. Manual windows, locks, no tach, steel wheels w/ hub caps (this could be a happy).
-Crosswinds made you it’s bitch!
-No aftermarket love
-The owners were either old ladies or people who barely maintained it.
-No soft surfaces.
-No hatchback option in the US
Overall, these cars are pretty dang underrated. If you need a relatively quirky NPC commuter, for not a lot of money, these are hard to beat!
LOL… My FJ is also the wind’s bitch!
Ditto my Fit.
The solitary off-center amber driving light gives it a certain devil-may-care quality that it just wouldn’t have had if it had two (or none). Bonus points if it actually works.
So I’m not the only one who has been binging too much Yellowstone! 😀
I remember a radio commercial for the Echo that used to run, and it was the most absurd thing, featuring an announcer with a cartoonishly thick Indian accent (keep in mind this was on a suburban Pennsylvania radio station) shouting about how the Toyota Echo has enough headroom for your Huge Melon Head.
Surely I can’t be the only one to remember this?
Baddest-Ass? Hmm. Doesn’t feel right, doesn’t quite roll off the tongue.
Workshopping it out loud here…
“Bad-ass” is an adjective, describing a thing with an ass, metaphorically, that is bad, meaning good. So to take that to the highest degree…
Obviously, “most bad-ass” is probably the most grammatically correct phrasing, but it doesn’t properly convey the level of bad-ass we’re describing in a convincing way.
Ok, so I see where you’re going there. The metaphoric ass is as good, aka bad, as it could possibly be, therefore “baddest”.
But that neglects the second half of the phrase. Should we not also pump up the ass in some way to denote that nothing else has as much of this good (bad) ass as does this? I immediately think of “assest”, but that seems more like a misspelling of several other things, so then I go to “assiest”. That starts to sound sorta like “nastiest”, which feels more apropos for asses, but it is also bad as in bad, not bad as in good, so it is contrary to the spirit of the superlative we’re looking for.
I think I kind of land on “assed”, as in having been endowed with an ass. That feels better because it gives the impression that a thing that didn’t have an ass was so great that it deserved to have one, so it has been assed. This puts the thing in the upper echelon of great things because not all great things are so great and their greatness in such a manner that they deserve to be granted their own ass.
“Baddest-Assed”? A bit more alliterative, feels marginally better. I don’t know, though, it seems like I’ve got some more thinking to do.
Looking forward to the next installment of ‘Jack Handy’s Random Thoughts’
The Echo is an awesome car that people hate on for no reason. It has all the legendary Toyota Quality and low running cost and will last a long long time with no problems 🙂
Too bad we never got the hatchback version that Canada got. They also got a sporty RS model and some cool colors not offered down here, including awesome blue and gold hatchbacks 😀
Canada got the hatchback, a blue example of which was driven by Gus on Psych even though it was not available to residents of the actual Santa Barbara for which Vancouver was standing in.
Yeah, I wish we had gotten the hatchback! It was available in that blue you mention, as well as an awesome gold color too 😀
I cannot find either pic at the moment, but here in Norcal there are two Yarii/Echos running around here – one with a ute-style pickup bed on it and another with a small u-haul style cargo box on it
I had a bar on my Eagle Summit in college. It make it go from looking like the lamest minivan to almost sorta like the Mercedes ML’s from Jurassic park.
The two deer I hit with that car didn’t hurt the car much either.
I bet the venison was good.
I remember when these first came out I insisted on pronouncing them “etch-Ohs” despite the salesman’s insistance otherwise. Also, wasn’t the very first Prius basically just an Echo? I seem to remember that.
It was, with the same beam axle in the rear but a different and more angular exterior that shared similarly awkward proportions determined by the platform’s hard points .
About your username, I thought Torch was a Legate.
I was assuming that he’s Cardssian?
I think in places where they kept selling the Yaris it eventually got a hybrid version. So yeah, basically they diverged to the Echo/Yaris staying more sedan-like while the Prius got more swoopy and liftback.
No mention of the fact that it has actual wheels rather than the ubiquitous plastic covers over steelies?
We clearly have a serious driver here.
I was wondering about the second set of holes #5-8. They’re interesting looking wheels, and it looks like they’re made to fit two different bolt circles.
I was wondering about that as well!
Like you and in your Pao, both fair haired and fauna are drawn.
indeering.
After the 2008 Recession the Duke Boys were forced to downsize.
Corporal Lee?
My sister had an Echo. She loved that car. It never broke despite my sister being… not exactly focused on car maintenance. She loved it’s no-nonsense simplicity. And of course, with it having basically no equipment whatsoever, there was tons of space for cubbies. There were weird shaped pockets all over basically every surface of this car.
Unfortunately, that car lived it’s life in Chicago and Upstate NY, and therefore it succumbed to the tin worm long, long, long before it would have given up the ghost for mechanical reasons. It rotted far too quickly, even for around here.
I’m from PA, we have our share of rust – but also vehicle inspections. The cars I see in Chicago are next level! Once saw a Collonade era Buick with the rear quarters flapping in the breeze like wings.
Detroit was like that, too. Didn’t like MA vehicle inspections until I saw what a lack of state inspections looked like and I’ve been a fan ever since.
Still is. Our cars are lighter and more aerodynamic. God bless the salt mine below our feet.
Cars that don’t pass PA inspection are sent to Ohio and WV for another life.
My friends had an Echo that she got as her first car – stick shift and great fuel economy. They eventually got a Yaris sedan as well, when his Stratus tapped out. She is pretty tiny, so worked well for her. He is about 6’6″ and 280lbs, so it looked like a circus bear driving a power wheels. Took having kids for them to finally get something bigger, but maintenance was also getting harder as things were getting rustier, which is a sad fate.
“… looked like a circus bear driving a power wheels.” Keeper! Thanks for the involuntary chuckle!
The Toyota Echo was a fantastic cheap people mover.
It was also the first car to introduce me to the center gauge cluster. I hated them then, I still hate them today. I shouldn’t have to turn my head to check my speed.
I got used to it almost immediately in the xB. I think I liked that it was mounted higher up so you just glance to the side instead of glancing down.
To each their own, I am not a fan.
That’s the saber-toothed Echo, a smallish predator most commonly found in the Plastic Scene Era.
This car was owned by your weird uncle Yaris.
And cousin Vitz
The Echo was blazingly fast too (depending on the context). I was in Nepal for work and had a driver who was probably around 20 years old. He was driving an Echo and we were on the outskirts of Kathmandu when he started giggling. I asked him why he was laughing and he said we were going 40 miles per hour which was the fastest he had ever driven.
That’s an ugly car.
That’s an ugly car.
I had two different friends who bought Echo’s brand new, and we were all twenty-somethings back then so I think their marketing hit the target?
The bull bar isn’t the only oddity here, those wheels are significantly bigger than the stock 15s, between the extra weight those add, and the probably 50+ lbs. of the bar this thing has got to be even slower than originally intended. I hope for their sake it’s the manual, the autos were pretty lazy.
Just don’t push the AC button uphill unless you have a tailwind.
Or try to tail your lead footed boss in her Tahoe through city traffic. I told her it was slow and to at least try to let me keep up. When we got where we were going she said “You weren’t lying when you said that car was slow”
One of the aforementioned Echo owners was briefly a girlfriend and I was borrowing her car for the day (we carpooled to work, and took turns between her Echo and my XJ Cherokee)
Reminds me of another small car sold by Toyota called the “Paseo”. Paseo means “walk” in English. Why would you call your car “walk”?!? If I have a car, I ain’t walking.
Paseo, the Tercel coupe that advertised its 100 hp in the late 90s.
That was the age of the Tercel looking so much like a BMW that you’d be convinced the E36 was fashioned out of wool (finest Merino wool, thanks) and Dad did the laundry AGAIN.
Those cars were quite light and the 100hp was actually pretty adequate for such a vehicle at that time. It’s never gonna win stoplight drags, but for the price you really couldn’t get a better car.
My aunt bought one new after she beat the hell out of a poor Celica my uncle had sold her after taking immaculate care of it. On a drive to a family gathering on the interstate, she encountered me in my ’84 Subaru wagon and made like she wanted to race. Somehow, she couldn’t pull more than a half of a hood length ahead despite the Subaru’s 73 hp and worse aero, though if she kept in it, she probably had a higher top speed than my 110. She dumped it within a few months. I think it was my joke, “You might pase-o, but you don’t pase-me.”
As impressed as I am with the bull bar – because I am – I’m even more appreciative of the skill and effort it must have taken to find some decent meat to bolt it to.
Much of the front of the little Echo is pretty much decorative. There’s sufficient structure to hold up the engine, the radiator support and suspension. And of course the bumper is a sturdy piece. But these things exist almost in disregard for anything else. So there’s support for the rad and the bumper and…that’s it.
I would be VERY curious to lift this thing up and see how it’s glued on.
Pepperidge farm remembers the Echo. And Yaris. What was so wrong with “Tercel?”
Here’s a story, I was working on a client’s house when we got to talking about the Echo he had parked in the front yard. Anyway, I ended up buying it for a song. I flipped it to a guy sight unseen. His whole hustle was to go around the country buying Echos and when he had enough he would export them to Central America. Whatever it takes to get by.
I just remember how the sedans mimicked contemporary Lexuses (Lexi?) in a shrinky-dink sort of way, especially around the C-pillar. Maybe that’s why older buyers went for it.
Older buyers went for Echo and Scion because, now that Im an old, they just want a car that isn’t hard to use, doesn’t have all that crap to break, is cheap and yet high quality. Toyota nailed that audience (by mistake).