I believe our last foray into mythology involved the VW Phaeton, which was quite a while ago, making this a bit overdue. So, the Toyota Echo: The car, as you can see, looks like a pregnant skateboard. Toyota made these little buggers from 2000-2005. They replaced the Tercel (which is what the profiled Paseo convertible was based on), and were themselves replaced by the Toyota Yaris, and to a certain extent, the Scion brand lineup.
The Echo was supposed to appeal to young buyers, but it was a bit of a failure on that front. Sure, it was priced well, with a base 2 door model MSRP of about $10,500, and it had the reputation of the Toyota name to back it up, but it was just not that great. While having a central gauge cluster is a quirky thing that works for cars like the Mini, it’s not something the Echo can pull off, and it was panned for its poor design. Aesthetically, the Echo doesn’t have a lot going for it. At a time when design preferences were shifting toward low and wide, with high belt lines, big rims, and reduced greenhouses, the Echo presents as tall and narrow with tons of glass greenhouse space making it feel top heavy with its handling despite its relatively low weight of just over 2,000 lbs. It featured teeny tiny space-saver-spare-type wheels and tires that only contributed to its lack of looks and feeling of body roll while cornering. Not to mention that the tall profile of the vehicle meant it was susceptible to cross winds at highway speeds. Just an overall “bleh” car, really. It was mildly peppy given its light weight and 1.5L inline 4 cylinder that made 108 HP and 105 lb-ft of torque, though that feeling could easily go away with a strong headwind.
It’s surprising then, to realize that somewhere, somebody saw fit to name this little heap after a beautiful mountain nymph from Greek mythology. Echo (the nymph, not the Toyota), was what’s called an Oread, which is just a fancy way of saying mountain nymph. Word has it, Echo had a fantastic set of pipes and loved to hear herself speak just as others loved to hear the sound of her voice. She rammed around out with a rather loose crowd and while her other Oread buddies were busy fooling around with Ruler of the sky, president and CEO of Mount Olympus, and god who never could manage to keep it in his pants, Zeus, Echo would distract Zeus’s jealous and all around vengeful bitch-kitty wife, Hera by telling her long winded stories.
It wasn’t long before Hera got wise to what was going on and decided to take out her wrath on Echo instead of on her no-good, cheatin’ hubby, Zeus. She cursed Echo so that her voice would only work to parrot the sounds that came from the mouths of others, making Echo seem like a complete nincompoop to anybody who made her acquaintance.
This predicament double-super-sucked for Echo because it wasn’t long after this happened that she feel in love with a certain self-absorbed pretty boy named Narcissus. Of course, Echo could never tell him how she felt about him, much less try to seduce with some slick pick up line, so she resorted to following him through the woods at a distance all stalker-like while he hunted.
While traipsing through the woods, one is apt to come upon a stream or pond here and there. It just happened that Narcissus found such a body of water and leaned over to drink from it, whereupon he spotted his reflection. It was love at first sight, and while Narcissus may have been a good looking fellow, he wasn’t particularly blessed with smarts, so it was quite a while he stayed at the pond staring at his handsome reflection, thinking he was flirting with some hot guy. It didn’t help that every pick up line he tried on the reflective Narcissus was parroted back to him by a certain obsessed, love-lorn mountain nymph stalker who was stationed nearby. The guy actually carried on what must have been an incredibly shallow conversation with his reflection for quite some time before it finally occurred to him that his love could never be, as he had fallen in love with a reflection of himself…. Yeah, I just hate it when that happens, don’t you?
Realizing he could never run off and start a hot, steamy affair with himself, Narcissus did as mythological types were wont to do back in the day and completely overreacted. He whipped out his hunting knife and killed himself right next to the pond. Because Narcissus was part nymph himself, his blood droplets became the seeds from which a new kind of flower sprang: the Narcissus, a plant whose blossoms bend down as if to behold their own reflections in a puddle of water or pond below.
You can imagine how poorly Echo handled this unfortunate chain of events. She ran off through the woods, crying and weeping, which doesn’t seem so bad, but then again, that’s not the worst of it. Somewhere along the way in her travels, she had managed to catch the eye of the god Pan. Echo was a little busy running through the woods bawling her eyes out, and wasn’t particularly receptive to Pan’s advances. Pan doesn’t take rejection well at all, and probably said something along the lines of “I’ll give you something to cry about!“. So, Pan did what he does best; he started a panic (the word is named for him, after all). This particular panic whipped up Pan’s shepherd followers into a frenzy. They caught up with Echo and tore her limb from limb and scattered her pieces around the earth, much like you might find pieces of a Toyota Echo scattered around an auto scrap yard (gotta bring it back to the automotives here and there). ….So, you know, that sucked for Echo. But it wasn’t all bad… I mean, it’s pretty bad overall, but at least there was some slight uptick at the end. It just so happens that the earth is governed by the goddess Gaia, who, unlike Zeus and his awful wife, Hera, is actually a pretty nice god. Gaia gathered up the pieces of Echo and managed to salvage and restore Echo’s voice so that she can resonate throughout the world as an echo of the sounds of others.
Given all that, you might expect something more grand from this particular Toyota that is the namesake of Echo… or maybe even expect Toyota to pick a name that might bode well for its buyers. After all, it’s not like Echo led a charmed life. In fact, the god’s pretty much had it in for her, so the name is kind of a curse if you think about it. At the very least, you’d think the Echo, from its name and the fact that it was trying to target young car buyers might feature a really slick sound system, at least. You’d be wrong on all counts. These cars were not well appointed. In fact, I’m not even sure a person could buy a Toyota Echo with power windows. And talk about cheap! A base MSRP of just over 10 grand? Just what are they trying to say about Echo? Well, whatever. The Echo is no more, having been replaced by the Yaris. There are still many on the road, but don’t count on them ever becoming a desirable classic. In that way, they probably do share the same fate as the mythological Echo, in that eventually, they will all likely be torn down, crushed up, and/or shredded in scrap yards, recycled and reassembled into echoes of their former selves as newer model cars not named after tragic mythological figures.
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