After 13 years its time to grow up, or so said Toyota as it dropped the ax on its youth-centric Scion brand this morning. To date, Scion has sold more than a million vehicles, 70 percent of which were purchased by buyers new to Toyota. The addition of the FR-S coupe and the iQ city auto gave the brand a temporary boost, but it never managed to recover selling only 56,167 vehicles previous year.
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Toyota has announced that the Scion brand will be phased out after the 2016 model year. Scion has allowed us to fast track ideas that would have been challenging to test through the Toyota network.
More recently, the brand introduced the Mazda 2 Sedan-based iA and the Toyota Auris-derived iM previous year, and had just revealed the C-HR concept auto in November – the production version would have given Scion a foothold in the lucrative B-segment crossover market. They are the Scion FR-S coupe, Scion iA sedan and Scion iM hatchback.
Officially, Toyota says the reason the Scion brand is going away because of a change in that demographic’s attitude-they’re no longer turned off by buying the sorts of vehicles their parents do, making Scion superfluous, says the News.
Scion enters the graveyard of defunct brands that include Mercury, Oldsmobile, Saab and Saturn. The brand will be axed in August and existing Scion models will be magically transformed into Toyotas, sort of like Cinderella at midnight.
Scion owners will continue to visit Toyota dealerships to have their cars serviced.
Toyota says it achieved what it had hoped with the Scion, including attracting younger buyers.
The biggest sales year for Scion was 2006 when it sold 175,000 cars.
The Scion brand is no more. There won’t be anyone taking a heat-gun and dental floss to swap the Scion badges for Toyota, because the changeover won’t happen until the 2017 model year.
Scion recruited a fair number of artists to make art cars.
Toyota is notifying dealers today (Feb. 3), Carter said. The brand was also a tacit admission that, a new generation of buyers, Toyota was an old-person’s brand.
It was not immediately clear how the move would affect the 1,004 dealerships that sell Scion vehicles.
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Scion’s staff of 22, representing sales, marketing, distribution, strategy, product, and accessories will have new roles at Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc.
