Toyota discontinues Scion after years of slumping sales

DETROIT (AP) - Toyota is killing its youth-oriented Scion brand after learning an important lesson: Young buyers simply want Toyotas.

The surprising announcement ends a 13-year experiment to connect with new and different customers for Toyota. He also conceded some younger buyers thought Scion was a lesser brand than Toyota, understandable considering Scions mostly sell for less than $22,000. Along with the equally mediocre xD and tC, it soldiered on without significant updates for years, while Toyota made an ill-fated attempt to spice up Scion with the FR-S sports auto and (now discontinued) iQ city vehicle, neither of which could provide the sales volumes Scion needed to sustain itself. Scion will completely cease production in August 2016. The C-HR, which recently debuted at the L.A. Auto Show, will be a part of the Toyota line-up.

Scion owners can continue to bring their vehicles into the same Toyota dealerships for service, which isn't surprising because they were mostly the same dealership with an extra sign. That makes sense, given that each model is already sold as a Toyota somewhere.

"The Scion brand never quite caught on in the way that Toyota hoped it would", she said. Only time will tell whether Toyota will use the Scion models to replace current Toyota models, or if they will join the lineup in addition to Toyota's jam-packed offerings. Three years ago, Reuters reported that the average Scion owner was 49 years old, whereas a Toyota exec had claimed the average age was closer to 30.

Considering that Scion just introduced two new models, the quite-good iA and the less-exciting iM, it's a surprising move by Toyota. Scion sales in Canada and the USA peaked at 173,034 vehicles in 2006, but have fallen back since then.

Toyota discontinues Scion after years of slumping sales

Scion was formed in 2003 to court Generation X buyers, who didn't like their parents' brands and didn't trust traditional marketing, says Bob Carter, Toyota Motor Corp.'s senior vice president of US operations.

All 1,004 Scion dealers nationwide are also Toyota dealers, so it's just a matter of removing the signage and stripping out the Scion elements, said Nancy Hubbell, spokesperson for the brand formerly known as Scion. Regardless, Toyota has seen fit to kill off Scion.

The Corolla outsold all of Scion by four or five to one most of the time Scion was a brand.

"Even Toyota can't compete with Toyota", Brauer said.