I Bought The World’s Smallest Four Seat Car 11 Months Ago. Here’s How It Handled A Grueling 33,000 Miles

Last winter, my wife and I bought a bit of a weird orphan. The Scion iQ was a city car that tried to be better than a Smart Fortwo, yet failed to even come close to that car’s abysmal sales. Most people have forgotten about it, but we’re still in love. We’ve even managed to drive it 33,000 miles in just 11 months. Here’s how the world’s smallest four seat car survived 11 months of some of the most brutal daily driving.

I want to start this off by being clear the “I” in the headline isn’t me specifically, but my wife and I as a couple. My wife paid for it and drove the vast majority of the 33,000 miles. Sheryl runs a one-person law practice serving the entire state of Illinois with a focus on civil rights and defending the poorest Illinoisans. If she has a client downstate, she has to drive hundreds of miles to appear in court. As a result, whatever vehicle she’s driving can collect a thousand miles in just a few days. To put this into perspective, the average American drives around 13,500 miles a year. Sheryl will finish out her year putting just under 40,000 miles on this car. That kind of heavy use can be grueling for any car, let alone one built for city travel.

Sheryl’s high-mile driving has been hard on every single car she’s owned, from a brand-new Subaru Impreza to a third-generation Toyota Prius. Last year, Sheryl’s daily driver was a 2010 Toyota Prius and her fun car was the 2001 BMW 525iAT that we bought from the Bishop. Then, one of our good friends lost her car. We helped her out by lending her the Prius. Sheryl thought the BMW could handle the hard driving until we got the Prius back. Unfortunately, our friend’s bad situation continued, meaning we never got the Prius back. Then, our friend crumpled the Prius in a collision with a deer.

This meant that Sheryl’s fun car became her permanent daily driver. I don’t need to tell you that a 23-year-old high-mileage BMW isn’t going to be the biggest fan of driving nearly 40,000 miles in a single year. The BMW started consuming an epic amount of oil and misfiring, and according to a number of mechanics, showed signs of imminent engine failure. This later turned out to be false, but the message to Sheryl was clear: She needed a reliable daily driver.

Here’s where a number of our own readers have gotten confused. Shouldn’t a lawyer be able to afford a much newer car? Well, contrary to popular belief, not all lawyers are rich. My wife represents the poorest of people, individuals who might have all of $50 to their name. These people can’t afford to pay a lawyer. They might also have a case where winning means not going to jail rather than getting a big check. A flashy car just isn’t in the cards.

At the same time, Sheryl does not want to take one of my cars into her world. Sheryl has a lot of enemies from bad landlords to entire police departments. A number of her enemies have vandalized her cars from slashing her tires to breaking mirrors and siphoning her fuel tank. It’s bad enough that we check her lug nuts to make sure people haven’t loosened them. One time, I got pulled over by a cop while driving her car. The officer was surprised to see it wasn’t her behind the wheel. Yeah, it’s as bizarre to me as it is to you. Sheryl wants to try her best to keep me out of the dramatic parts of her practice.

When it came time to replace the Prius, Sheryl decided she wanted a fun car. She loves my Smarts but I steered her away. I know just too many nightmarish ways Smarts can fail. What’s the next best thing? A Smart by Toyota, of course! In early December, we made it so and brought home a 2012 Scion iQ.

I’ve written about how the fascinating engineering that went into this car and I’ll keep it short by stealing my own words:

Like the Fortwo, the iQ is a packaging marvel. Toyota was proud to call the iQ the “World’s Smallest Four-Seater” and a lot of clever engineering went into the vehicle to achieve it. Click here to read my retrospective, but the short version is that Toyota moved the differential to the front of the engine, made a more compact steering system, designed a smaller air-conditioner pack, hid the fuel tank under the cabin floor, slimmed down the seats, staggered the interior, and even deleted the glove compartment.

Your rear passengers have their head literally a few inches from the rear glass. So, to protect their noggins in a crash, Toyota implemented what it calls the world’s first rear curtain airbag.

Unlike a Fortwo, an iQ keeps its smart engineering pretty low-key. A Smart likes to advertise its safety cage and its rear engine, but an iQ feels like a regular Toyota inside. Your clues that the car’s a bit funky come from the offset seating, no glovebox, and when you turn your head to reverse and realize you could touch the back window. You never really get the feeling that the engine is buzzing away right in front of your feet.

In practice, it’s really easy to live with a Scion iQ. It feels a lot like owning a Toyota Yaris that shrunk in a washing machine. You just hop in the car every morning and it fires up without failure. It always engages gear and it always arrives at its destination. The iQ seems entirely unbothered by being a daily driver scooting through rural America even though it wasn’t really built like it. This is a car that reminds you of why Toyota got its reputation for building reliable, sturdy transportation. To quote Todd Howard, it just works.

The Honeymoon Phase

Every car comes with a honeymoon phase. It’s that early period when you feel that everything is perfect with a car and you’re just madly in love with it. I like to think that I wear rosy shades during a car’s honeymoon period. When I do, all of the red flags just look like flags. Sheryl doesn’t need colored shades because every flag looks the same to her eyes, anyway.

In the early days, we couldn’t get over how snappy the iQ’s steering was and how the vehicle felt like it had the width of a normal small car, but could still fit into impossibly tiny spaces. I spent minutes at a time testing out the car’s impossibly tiny turning circle by doing figure-eights around signs in parking lots.

I marveled at how the car did seemingly everything better than my second-generation Smart Fortwos and did so with enough room for a full adult to sit in one rear seat and some cargo to take up the sort of useless fourth seat. And the stereo? It remains one of the best sound systems I’ve experienced in such a small car. You can tell that Scion was targeting young people with the iQ even though basically nobody bought any regardless of age.

Early on, the car returned in the 40 mpg range for fuel economy and honestly, it was a total giggle going from empty to full for less than $20. I began to question whether Smarts really were the best city cars.

The Midwest Does Its Damage

This was short-lived because Chicago came swinging hard. Sheryl had the car for about a month before the first problem occurred. She hit a pothole on the right side of the car. This caused the front right tire to blow before bending its wheel and the rear wheel bent immediately after.

This is when we started seeing cracks in the iQ’s armor, or rust, for that matter. These cars had a base price of $15,265, but that didn’t include apparent luxuries like alloy wheels. The base steel wheels? Yeah, they’re pretty garbage. The wheels were pretty rusty, so we dismissed the bending as just something that happened because the wheels might have been weakened. We replaced the front wheel with a brand-new steelie, had the rear wheel repaired, and put it back on the road.

Both that new front wheel and the existing rear would get bent again earlier this summer on another pothole.

I’m not sure if we’re just unlucky or what, but I’ve never owned a car that’s gone through as many steelies as this Scion does. Sheryl’s remedy was to get bigger and wider tires than stock. This had the effect of softening the ride and it stopped the steelies from bending, so that seemed to have fixed the issue.

Sadly, I wish the harm ended at the potholes. I regularly inspect the vehicles in our fleet for corrosion and the iQ has little pockets of rust beginning to form all over the place.

There’s a tiny rust spot on the passenger door as well as several bubbles under the door seals along the door sills. It looks like the door seals are trapping dirt and road salt in places car washes can’t reach and that’s wreaking havoc on the vehicle’s poor finish.

It gets worse from there. Back in the spring we put the car on a lift to conduct a repair and found that the front subframe is looking mighty crusty. These pictures just don’t show the extent of the crust. Thankfully, it’s still a solid piece for now, but that’s something we’ll have to replace sometime down the line.

Sadly, rust isn’t unheard of for a Toyota of this vintage. Remember, Toyota’s old truck frames were infamous for rotting out from underneath the bodies, so I’m not surprised the little iQ is showing more corrosion than I’d like to see on a vehicle this age. My 2012 Smart Fortwo is exactly the same age with far more miles and yet has less rust. That’s even after I parked it covered in mud, too.

With that said, I’m not sure Toyota helped itself here with the design of the iQ, either. The iQ’s body has a ton of places for detritus to gather such as in the rear wheel wells and in the rockers. In terms of the body, I’m actually a little disappointed.

The Long Haul

Once I got over what I didn’t like about the corrosion, we just continued to drive the little iQ. The car’s first really big test came in February when Sheryl and I went on a far too long belated honeymoon trip.

We took the little Scion down Route 66 from our home in northern Illinois to the Grand Canyon in Arizona and back. By the time we got back home over a week later, the iQ had traversed over 4,000 miles without skipping a beat. The car climbed through the Rockies, challenged mountain snowstorms, battled desert heat, and put on each mile as if it was made to do it.

This trip did reveal a few more of the car’s weaknesses. For one, it guzzles fuel above 75 mph. If you drive too fast, the CVT sends the engine’s RPM a bit too high and your fuel economy might get as low as 29 mpg. At least that’s what it’s like in our car.

Another downside is noise. There’s a ton of road noise at speed and you can’t escape it. You always hear the tires, always hear the wind, and always hear the bumps. Playing the stereo loud does drown it out, but you’re only replacing one noise with another noise. Add it up and a day of driving the iQ can drain your senses, even if you the drive isn’t particularly demanding. Thankfully, the engine does stay quiet most of the time. But the road noise is loud enough that we’re considering finding a tire known for quietness, which is something we’ve never had to do with any other vehicle, including Smarts.

Sheryl and I have differing opinions on the interior. My biggest problem with the interior is the lack of armrests. Your outer arm has an armrest, but Toyota’s engineers did nothing for your inner arms. So they’re sort of just flopping around uncomfortably. We’ve rectified this with a cheap armrest from Amazon, but it’s sort of a weird oversight.

Sheryl dislikes the seats. She says they are not comfortable on long drives and they’re only made worse by the lack of bolstering and the lack of heating. Smart somehow offered bolstered and heated seats, why couldn’t Toyota? Indeed, I do feel the iQ’s seats are more comparable to the seats found in a city bus, but I don’t find them as uncomfortable as Sheryl does.

Upon getting home from the trip, Sheryl found two upgrades she wanted to do. The first was a touchscreen radio with Apple CarPlay. The next was an aftermarket cruise control.

Sheryl replaced the factory infotainment system with a Pioneer NEX unit based on a review I did at the old site. Unfortunately, her NEX unit suffered from a fatal problem where it constantly bricked itself and boot-looped. Pioneer replaced the unit because the issue was internal and could not be fixed, but Sheryl doesn’t trust it anymore.

So, we swapped out headunits. I gave her the old Boss stereo I reviewed at the old site and took her NEX for some other car of mine. I don’t drive enough to know if the NEX is going to fail again, but I can say the Boss is working great in the iQ. It might be even better since the Boss has wireless CarPlay unlike the Pioneer.

Next came the cruise control. These cars never had cruise control from the factory, so the kits are aftermarket. Sheryl paid roughly $800 total for a kit and to have that kit installed at a dealership. Sadly, the kit is not really plug-and-play like most aftermarket cruise controls. Instead, some soldering of important wires is required. Still, the end result looks like it is factory!

The iQ has since been our rock. The car was there when my cars broke. The car is always there for every airport run. The car is there even when the temps are -20 degrees. No matter what, the Scion iQ never disappoints. The iQ is so reliable that it has been our primary road trip car, no matter where we’re going in the country.

High-Mileage Warrior

Now, just this week the car has surpassed 100,000 miles. We got this car with 67,000 miles on its odometer and in less than a year the odometer has lit up its sixth digit. If Sheryl’s mileage trends continue, she will finish out the year with close to 110,000 miles.

Over that time, the car has encountered only a few problems. The first was that the air-conditioner compressor bit the dust. We bought a new one for around $400 from RockAuto and then my brother (a Toyota and Subaru technician) installed it for free, though we still tossed him some money for his time and the use of his service bay. In all, we spent about $800 on that project.

During the summer, Sheryl hit a so-called tire gator – a large strip of bulky rubber left behind from a failing semi-trailer tire. This put a huge hole in the front bumper and broke a weld on the vehicle’s exhaust. Thankfully, a body shop somehow found a new old stock bumper and installed it, making the Scion look as good as new. You can barely even notice the color differences:

Currently, the car is suffering from two issues. The first is that the cruise control unit is failing. It appears that there’s a short happening in the cruise control. When this happens, the vehicle’s ECU loses its signal from the digital throttle pedal. As a result, the car either does an uncommanded redline, or the throttle cuts entirely. Thankfully, either failure mode immediately results in limp mode, so the car doesn’t end up flying off of a highway or something.

I’ve found that disconnecting the cruise control fixes the throttle problem. We’re not entirely sure what to do about this. Uninstalling the cruise control to replace it with a new one will be a total pain in the butt and there’s no telling if the new one would have the same problem in less than a year. For now, we’re sort of just connecting it only for long trips, which sucks, but is a working middle ground for now.

The second issue is that the rear brake drums are, in the words of our mechanic, “rusting apart.” More specifically, the internal hardware in the rear drums has gotten properly nasty. This is resulting in a weird clicking sound and according to our mechanic, reduced braking performance. So, that’s getting fixed next week.

Fun, But Loud

I decided to end my observations by asking Sheryl to give me what she likes most about the car and what she dislikes the most. She gave me three of both.

Sheryl says that she loves how predictable the car is. Unlike her old BMW and even her previous 2018 Subaru Impreza, there’s never a surprise. The car just starts up and drives every single time. The BMW was a great driving machine, but starting it felt like rolling a D20.

She also loves how the car is an attention-getter. Nearly everyone loves the car from kids to car enthusiasts. Sheryl loves how the car is a cheap way to get something that people will take pictures of. Finally, she also loves how the car turns impossibly tight, fits anywhere, and for her, is a blast to drive under any condition.

The top of her negative list is the fact that the car is sometimes annoyingly loud. If she had the time, Sheryl says she’d have more sound deadening installed because at time it feels like you’re outside with the tires. Sheryl is also not much of a fan of how fuel economy drops to 29 mpg when she’s really on the throttle. The vehicle is due for new spark plugs, so maybe that’ll fix it. Lastly, she still dislikes the seats.

I love the car for its style, its practicality, and its engineering. Toyota’s engineers did a brilliant job in packing a four-seat car (more like a 3+1 but we’ll let that slide) into a such a tiny space. And then, that tiny car is also proficient at more than just scooting around a city. I stand by my word when I say these cars are deeply underrated.

That said, I still prefer Smarts.

My main complaint remains with all of the ways Toyota is seemingly promoting rust development on this car’s body. Was it really necessary to neglect wheel well liners? I’m also not the biggest fan of working on the thing. I mean, you have to go through the intake to get to the spark plugs. But that’s the sacrifice you make when you get a cute tiny car.

That minor stuff aside, the car’s been great. Sheryl has given the car seven oil changes in the past 11 months and even had the CVT fluid changed.

So, can you drive a city car over 30,000 miles in less than a year? Absolutely, and you’ll have a load of fun doing it, but going tiny does have its drawbacks. Her hope is to get this thing to 300,000 miles and beyond, so she’s trying to stay on top of the maintenance. Barring any crashes, I have no doubt Sheryl will hit that mileage and it’ll happen sooner than you think.