Toyota kills off its Scion brand

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.

Toyota plans to drop the slow-selling Scion brand this summer and blend most of its current vehicles into the Toyota lineup, the automaker said today. The parent company from Japan tries to sugarcoat the situation with a happy-go-lucky statement that goes like: “This isn’t a step backward for Scion; it’s a leap forward for Toyota”.

Over a million Scion cars found homes with a younger demographic than your typical Toyota buyer – buyers averaged an age of 36 years old.

Beginning in August, 2017 model-year Scion vehicles will be rebadged as Toyotas. However, the tC coupe will be given one final edition and then sent out to pasture at the end of the 2016 model year.

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. The brand will be axed in August and existing Scion models will be magically transformed into Toyotas, sort of like Cinderella at midnight.

A new model in development, the C-HR, will make its debut as a Toyota. Scion, which is only sold in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico, has no stand-alone dealerships. It’s still going into production but will be branded as a Toyota. Lentz was founding VP of Scion and is now CEO of Toyota, North America.

A logo is pictured at AutoNation Toyota dealership in Cerritos, California December 9, 2015. Killing Scion now might take some of the spotlight off lagging sales and negative attention every time sales numbers are announced.

FILE – In this April 1, 2015, file photo, the 2016 Toyota Scion iM appears on display at the New York International Auto Show.

Scion employees are reportedly being offered the chance to apply for jobs within Toyota, but it’s not yet clear if all will be able to move across. It appeared that Toyota was on the verge turning the brand around, not once, but twice – first with the now-discontinued iQ city vehicle in 2011 and the FR-S sports auto (known to us as the Toyota 86) in 2012.

“Over the last dozen years, Scion products have not resonated with consumers, and the lineup grew stale despite recent attempts to revitalize it”, Kelley Blue Book senior analyst Rebecca Lindland said in a email.