Toyota discontinues Scion after years of slumping sales

Scion acted as a funnel to bring new buyers to Toyota, Lentz says, with 70% of Scion buyers never having owned a Toyota-made vehicle.

“I was there when we established Scion and our goal was to make Toyota stronger by learning how to better attract and engage young customers”, Lentz said.

Half of Scion buyers were aged below 35, a group which accounted for 27 per cent of Toyota sales and was expected to grow, the company said. Also making the cut and transitioning to Toyota for MY17 are the FR-S, iA, and iM. The other vehicles in the current lineup, the iA (a rebadged and re-nosed Mazda 2 sedan), the iM (the Corolla/Auris five-door hatch), and the FR-S (our Toyota 86) carry over into the 2017 Toyota range. The company picked the Los Angeles Auto Show in November to reveal the C-HR concept small crossover.

The service and fix process for Scion customers will be unaffected by this change as customers will continue to visit Toyota dealerships’ service departments. Toyota says it already told the Scion and Toyota dealer councils, and they both supported the decision.

But those customers have grown up, Toyota said, and now prefer Toyota cars and can pay Toyota prices.

But Toyota said those buyers have a “different mindset” than when Scion first debuted and have “come to appreciate the Toyota brand and its traditional attributes of quality, dependability and reliability”. The brand never really caught on, with slow sales, long product droughts and many reports claiming that average buyers were in their late 40s. At the same time, the Scion we have now is a far cry from the quirky, youthful brand that launched in 2003.

Many Scion vehicles will be re-branded as Toyotas, according to a press release.

Moving forward, Toyota will be absorbing the Scion brand.

Annual volume since then has been below 60,000 units, except for 73,505 sales in 2012 and 68,321 in 2013, when Scion was rejuvenated by the FR-S rear-wheel-drive sports auto. The sales saw constant decline, which reached a whole 68% in 2015 when compared to sales of 2006. Others followed suit (Nissan and Infiniti, Honda and Acura), and Toyota tried it for a second time with Scion, a sub-brand aimed at the young. “The average age of a Scion buyer was 36 years old”, according to USA Today.

Twenty-two team members are left, employees who have been given the opportunity to apply for new positions at Toyota Motor Sales’ headquarters in Torrance, California.