Modding a Scion Xa

[sustainable sam]

Long time lurker here and I'm finally ready to get off my butt and start modding. I hope that starting a thread will help motivate me to continue completing mods and provide some feedback. I have read Neil's thread and plan on incorporating many of his mods to my Scion. The mods will mostly be aero but will include larger tires (probably next year) and maybe a power steering delete.

I deleted my mud flaps and added a ScanGuage a year and a half ago when I got my car.

Mods Completed:
- Upper Grill Block

[nbleak21]

Looking forward to it! I've been considering replacing my truck with a more eco (and wallet) friendly vehicle, and the Xa is on my shortlist.

[sustainable sam]

This weekend I worked on a grill block. The pipe insulation has been in place for a few weeks.

The small area of the upper grill that was not yet blocked


Complete upper grill block with partial lower block and fog light cover. I did only one fog light cover to see how it looked. I'm not 100% sure if I will keep the fog light covers or not. I will probably add an identical lower block to the other side so 2/3 of the lower grill will be blocked. The lower grill block is choroplast connected with zip ties.

[sustainable sam]

Originally Posted by nbleak21

Looking forward to it! I've been considering replacing my truck with a more eco (and wallet) friendly vehicle, and the Xa is on my shortlist.

Yeah I know the feeling. I have a Jeep Cherokee that gets about 12mpg on my short commute. The Scion Xa is a pretty decent little car. The mileage is pretty good and I live in a mountainous area that is normally fairly windy.

[NeilBlanchard]

Smooth and flat wheel covers are quite helpful. You can also seal the hood gap with some soft foam gasket that has the adhesive on it.

Do you have the auto or the manual shift? Are you coasting in neutral and/or downshifting to slow down? If you put the front defroster on at all, you get A/C which kills the FE. I just unplug the fuse; but now the coolant has leaked out after a couple of years without any use.

[sustainable sam]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

Smooth and flat wheel covers are quite helpful. You can also seal the hood gap with some soft foam gasket that has the adhesive on it.

Do you have the auto or the manual shift? Are you coasting in neutral and/or downshifting to slow down? If you put the front defroster on at all, you get A/C which kills the FE. I just unplug the fuse; but now the coolant has leaked out after a couple of years without any use.

I have sealed the hood gap already. I noticed the defrost increase gallons per hour by almost .10 gallons at idle. So you unplug the fuse to be able to still use the front defrost but without using ac? I wonder if that was done to keep the ac in good working order.

I have the auto so I am limited in terms of hypermiling. I typically will downshift to slow down if its a long enough distance. My techniques could use some improvement as you can see from my average.

Thanks for the comment.

[ChazInMT]

The A/C is used in warmer temperatures to dry out the air before it gets blown on the inside of your wind screen so it will be able to dry off the fog the has formed on it. I was always under the impression that the car knows the outside temp and below 35°F or so it would disable the A/C so only warm air would blow. Air at < 40°F does not have much moisture to begin with, so simply heating it will make a low humidity wind to clear condensation off your window. It's that 30-45°F temperature and high relative humidity that it all kinda goes haywire for me, too cold to need A/C but until the engine warms, it's all you got.

So in short, the A/C aids the deFOG function of your "defroster" at 40-70°F, isn't worth a darn to actually defrost....as your intuition probably told you. I've been contemplating pulling my A/C fuse in the cooler temps since I think they're too conservative in where they have the temperature cut off for that.

[NeilBlanchard]

I just unplug the A/C fuse and run the windshield defroster without it. Yes, it takes a bit longer to clear moisture in certain situations - but that is what towels are for. There are at least three situations that I see fairly often when A/C definitely hurts the defroster working well: when there is a frost on the outside of the glass and I have not scraped it well, when it is raining and the air temp is close to the dew point (I have had droplets condensing on the inside of the glass) and most critically in an freezing rain storm - you need full heat to stay ahead of the ice forming on the outside.

As I mentioned, you probably should plug the fuse back in at least once or twice during the winter and run the defroster, if you want to avoid losing the refrigerant.

The controls in the xA do not modify the A/C at all in the defrost mode - it should shut off the A/C after a minute or so; and/or it should be manually toggled off (or on). The A/C light should come on when you are in defrost, but it does not; and if it did you should be able to push the A/C switch to toggle it off or on.

Sam, you should be able to coast in neutral (when you want to carry momentum) and get 200-350MPG depending on speed.

[sustainable sam]

Neil I have used neutral coasting a fair amount but have stopped recently due to concerns of hurting the transmission. I might have to try taking the fuse out since we live in a cold climate.

I should also mention that my wife is driving the car most of the time. She will have a 75 mile per day commute for the next three weeks which will be about 65 miles of highway.

[sustainable sam]

I went ahead and put the other side of the lower grill block in and covered the other fog light whole. My wife's first commute was about 33 mpg at 65-70 mph.