Originally Posted by dante

Lol. "Rich racing and sports car history?" Maybe to someone like you or I, since we're on this site, but to everyone else? "Toyota" meas generic appliance, and Accord is probably the first (and often the last) car that comes to mind. The last "sports car" was the Supra, last imported to the US in 1998 and primarily known only in its FnF heavily modified form. The "sporty" cars like the Celica and the MR-2 were only adequate in the best of times, and underperformed the competition on more than one occasion. And now they're gone as well. There's no way you can compare Toyota's racing pedigree to someone like Subaru, Citroen or Ford with their WRC championships, Audi with their endurance racing, or even a company like VW that has put out easily tunable (and fast) cars like the GTI for almost 30 years. Face it, to 99% of the population, Toyota is the Maytag of cars. Whether it has a Scion, Toyota, or TRD logo, the FT-86 is going to stand or fall based on it's performance and execution alone.

Here we go.....: I never compared Toyota to Ford or Subaru, all my reasoning came from a comparison of toyota to Scion. Yes, in recent years toyota has not been much more then "cardboard brown" when it comes to looks or performance, but our generation(I am 33 as well, go figure) knew toyota in a different light and todays generation are more likely to go on the internet and educate themselves when they hear about a hot new car that is based off of an old sports car, and then get into the history.

No, what killed the Sky Redline was the fact that it was WAY too expensive ($32,000??), especially compared to it's $29,500 sibling. Why would anyone want to pay $2500 more for a car that has a Saturn badge instead of a Pontiac badge? I mean, for all that Pontiac *does* have a racing pedigree, how many Solstice GXPs did they actually sell?

Actually, I went through this first-hand and bought a sky redline, because the pontiac dealership down the street was asking for 3500 over sticker while Saturn was sticking to their no haggle MSRP purchase. The Solstice was only cheaper when you compared it without the options. They were identical except that the sky could only be purchased with, what were, the options of a fully loaded solstice. I owned the car for 2 years and loved it. It was a scream of a car and got very little recognition because no one saw it as a legit performance vehicle - the solstice suffered the same fate.

Sorry, but I'm 33 and have drooled over the Supra ever since seeing Alexei Kovalev take off in a blaze of tire smoke after a NY Rangers practice sometime around 1995 and even still I wouldn't give two rat tails for Toyota's "heritage". The "sports" cars that have been around from Toyota in my lifetime could probably be counted on one hand (MR-2, Supra, AE-86, ummmm...). I wouldn't even count the Celica GT-S without *really* widening the scope of "sports cars" as it was barely middle of the pack compared to the Si and GTI, and was far harder to tune than either.

Can't disagree that there are few sports cars, but at the same time, all of these vehicles were incedibly significant in their time. Also, toyota has 3 you could remember, scion.......ummmmm...0?
So no, I really don't think that putting the Scion badge on it would harm it any, just as putting the Toyota badge won't bring it any additional prestige. The people who think of Toyota as washing machines will always think of them as washing machines, and the people who think of Scion as a youth-only brand will continue to think that way as well (along with Lexus as the boring old executives car).