“This isn’t a step backward for Scion; it’s a leap forward for Toyota”, Toyota North America CEO Jim Lentz said in a statement.
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A press release issued this morning said the decision to discontinue Scion was made in part because the younger buyers Scion was founded to attract are happy buying Toyota models.
Japanese vehicle companies have been experimenting with US-market sub-brands for quite a while now.
While Scion likes to tout that 70% of its buyers were new to Toyota, early trade-in information for the iA and iM shows most of its buyers were trading in Toyotas.
Toyota is portraying the move is a victory, saying that younger buyers who may have shunned the Toyota brand at the time of Scion’s inception now have a more positive view of it. Therefore, The FR-S sports auto, iA sedan, iM 5-door hatchback and the C-HR will become part of the Toyota lineup. The company even previewed a sporty C-HR at a Los Angeles auto show in November, according to Motor Trend. As for current Scion owners, Toyota says they needn’t worry; service and repairs will be carried out by Toyota dealers.
But in 1992, Daihatsu suddenly withdrew from the United States, citing voluntary import quotas that restricted volume to just 12,000 vehicles per year, a recession that dented sales and a lack of brand awareness. Well, spinning sub-brands off existing cars is far from an American phenomenon – look at the likes of DS trying to break away from Citroen, and posh-Nissan outfit Infiniti’s continuing struggles to make headway in Europe. Scion also doesn’t have any SUVs, which are rapidly becoming the most popular style of vehicle in the U.S.
It helped that Scion’s tightly-focused branding and marketing strategy hit it off with its Gen X target groups, in the way a Toyota campaign with its broad demographic requirements could never have done. The local Toyota dealerships had something different, something cheeky that garnered the attention of a new audience.
It’s not unusual for automakers to kill a brand or pull it out of a particular market. The Corolla outsold all of Scion by four or five to one most of the time Scion was a brand. The brand was not introduced to Canada until 2010.
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Toyota Motor Corp. on Wednesday announced plans to scrap its Scion brand and fold its operations into the Toyota division.
