If It's Too Loud, You're Too Old; Toyota RSC redefines mobility. If you don't understand it, that's okay. Your kids will.

We have seen a trend, and we don't understand it. Still, we know a trend when we see one.

The feeling: Look at something, or several somethings, and a pattern emerges. If this ``something'' comes as the result of a convergence of disparate creative critical masses, it's a trend.

We see a trend in Toyota's RSC.

RSC is a design and style aimed at a discriminating audience-kids. Children with cash. A new economy. But swirling around RSC is something less tangible, which has the potential to be more important than what young Bobby thinks is phat to drive; it is the process about how RSC came to be, and whether or not it becomes a template for future Toyotas built around the world.

To understand RSC, you should understand how this Rugged Sport Coupe came to be unveiled at the Chicago auto show. Officials at Toyota Motor Corp. realized that for the company to continue to prosper it must entice a younger audience than the buyers it has today. Various solutions were pursued. They formed a think tank, dubbed genesis, to ``infuse a youthful spirit'' into the product lineup. In Japan, Toyota built an amusement park with an automotive theme on the outskirts of downtown Tokyo. At the 1999 Tokyo motor show, Toyota unveil- ed the Will Vi, a retro-chic econo-commuter that was more a fashion statement than anything else. And the kids loved it.

How, then, to deal with kids in the United States, the largest industrialized car market in the world? Whereas in the past Toyota would give a design mandate to its studios around the world and set in motion a contest of sorts where a winner is chosen among the various designs, RSC sprung out of a different mindset. The mother ship challenged its Southern California design studio to develop something-anything-that appeals to those spiked-haired, body-pierced, skateboard-riding Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers who live outside its door. RSC is mobility fused by disparate qualities and attributes-goals, ideas, needs, wants-identified by social scientists as those that appeal to American kids. RSC speaks to the vert-ramp emotion of an aggressive in-line skater. RSC tugs at our viscera the way watching a street luge exhibit or a whitewater kayak competition does. Hey, that looks fun, but is that for us?

The design angularity is pure Japanese. Put RSC alongside Toyota's RAV4 and its lineage becomes distinct. Set RSC next to a winged and scooped Paris-Dakar racer, and the DNA becomes even more pronounced, which is not by coincidence; that is one definition of a new-generation sports car.