#13. Scion Hako Coupe Concept Car – “Young Audience” Doesn’t Mean “Incredibly Weird”
Source: Wikimedia
The Scion brand took a lot of chances with their concept cars. It was a great way for Toyota to experiment without really negatively affecting their main Toyota brand. Enter the Scion Hako Coupe.
What Scion Was Thinking
Any company that is marketing to a younger generation is in an interesting bind. When it comes to engineering and developing vehicles, there’s a large amount of experience that goes into it. This can mean the people doing the developing for a younger generation are out of touch with the interests and needs of that generation.
Scion developers wanted to make it a cool young car since some of their offerings were very plain and utilitarian. They tried, but it also seemed like they tried far too hard to appeal to the younger generation and it comes off as disingenuous.
Hako inspired Scion xB – Source: Shutterstock
What the Public Thought of It
When someone takes the first glance at the Hako they tend to think “wow”. It’s the bright orange paint. However, as people started taking a further look, the warm reception waned. The Box style body wasn’t exciting. The windows tried to be innovative but ended up just feeling odd. It seems like choosing the wraparound look for both the windshield and the side windows was just too much.
When people saw inside the Hako, it looked like what an old man thinks young people are doing. It was filled with video screens and one of the ugliest steering columns to ever exist in a vehicle. The choice to make the driver special with orange interior coloring and everyone else in drab black was again an odd choice. In the end, it was just a miss.
Despite this, Scion created the xB with a lot of the same styling cues as the Hako.
