Toyota Kills Off Scion Brand

Toyota said this morning that it is ending the Scion brand and will fold the models into the Toyota brand starting in August.

According to the announcement from Toyota USA, the company has sold more than a million of the cars and more than 70% of buyers were new customers, while 50% were under the age of 35. Toyota sold 56,167 Scion vehicles in 2015, a decline of 68 per cent in a U.S. market that favors larger sport utility vehicles and trucks.

Toyota will discontinue Scion, rebranding its existing models to the parent company, it was announced Wednesday, Feb. 3. The average tC buyer is just 29 years old, claimed to represent the lowest in the industry.

Only the Scion tC sports coupe will be dropped. Most recently, Scion had introduced two compelling new products that impressed us when we drove them: the iA subcompact sedan, which is based on the Mazda2; and the Scion iM, a stylish compact hatchback related to Europe’s Toyota Auris.

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.

A spokeswoman said Toyota would realise “efficiencies” from not having to promote a separate brand, but declined to provide figures. The brand is sold through 1,004 Toyota dealerships, which will continue to service the cars.

I wasn’t personally a fan of Scion, but rang in the new year with an FR-S Toyota sent over for review.

Launched with much fanfare in 2002, Scion was at once a bold experiment and an admission of failure. I don’t know that it was ever an exciting brand though, which could be part of why it never became the runaway success Toyota might have hoped it’d become.

Lentz is now the CEO of Toyota Motors North America. 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. So will the C-HR, a small SUV concept shown at the L.A. Auto Show that Toyota will likely make. “Scion products have not resonated with consumers, and the lineup grew stale”, Kelley Blue Book senior analyst Rebecca Lindland told Business Insider. After all, most Scions were just mildly rebadged Toyotas to begin with, so not much is actually changing – aside from the sign outside the dealer.