So I’m going to end up with an orphan-brand car. The news this morning is that Toyota is pulling the plug on Scion, at the end of the 2016 model year. Good call. Scion had some relevance in its first few years, but it soon slipped into irrelevance. Why?
Scion was launched in response to Toyota’s very serious concerns about young buyers in the 1990s negative perception of the Toyota brand. They did not want to be seen in the same brand as what their parents drove, and Scion was the easy way out: a sub-brand, targeted to younger buyers with funkiness and no-haggle buying. And it worked, quite well during the original xB’s tenure. But then that may have had more to do with the intrinsic charms of that unique vehicle than the brand.
Toyota says that the new generation of young (potential) car buyers is different. They’re not rebellious anymore, and look up to their parents including their choice of car brands. If Mom and Dad use iPhones and drive Toyotas, so do the kids. Everyone is cool now; it’s all in the family. So Scion’s reason for existence has fallen away, thanks to the new family dynamics.
So now that Toyotas are cool for all ages, that means that Scion was at risk of becoming a “lesser Toyota”; a discount sub-brand where most of the cheaper Toyotas (and Mazdas) are sold. That’s decidedly not cool.
The beauty about Scion is that there’s very little cost (if any) to pulling the plug. All Scions have always been legally Toyotas. So now they will wear the Toyota badge. That’s going to make some folks happy. FR-S owners will not have to re-badge their cars as Toyotas anymore.
The Scion line-up will continue just as it has been. The tC coupe was already scheduled to be axed after the 2016 MY. And the Scion C-HR concept will appear as a Toyota for 2017. It’s all one happy family, again.
Update: please read all the comments first before commenting. There’s a lot of misunderstanding as to the difference between a genuine car “brand” and a “sub brand” like Scion. There are very specific legal and business differences between the two. Perception is not always reality. Thanks. PN
Ho-hum. The xB was unique, cute and quirky. What has come from Scion lately were Toyotas in spirit anyway. I see this move as following the cadre of original Scion buyers into maturity, grooming them for their first Camry as they grow older and slower. It may seem like looking way ahead for a car company, but that is what the Japanese do, and well.
From what I have read this morning, the decision has little to do with what people perceive, and more to do with a weak lineup.
“…But critically panned design choices — such as the cramped iQ mini car — set the brand on a path toward irrelevancy for the average new-vehicle shopper. The last straw, you could say, was plunging gasoline prices, which have crushed sales of the type of small cars Scion pursued.
“It just never got traction and it has been on life support for at least five years, if not longer,” said Peter De Lorenzo, a former auto marketing executive and editor of Autoextremist.com, in an interview. “But kudos to Toyota for admitting that it was superfluous and they were wasting a lot of money trying to make the brand survive.”
Scion’s sales fell 3% in 2015 to 56,187 units. But was down 24% from 73,507 in 2012 and down 68% from its high point of 173,034 units in 2006.”
Source: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2016/02/03/toyota-scion-brand/79747406/
Every orphan brand that was discontinued by the major automakers were done because the sales didn’t justify the costs. Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Mercury, Scion, were largely products of their parental brands so it wasn’t particularly difficult to reincorporate those models into the main brand.
Yes, it is rather ridiculous to claim it’s being killed because today’s kids like their parent’s choices. They don’t have a good lineup, period.
And who’s line-up of subcompact and compact cars are growing sales-wise these days? Everyone is cutting back production of them, and increasing production of trucks and CUVs. And Toyota was not going to do a Saturn, and start selling trucks and SUVs under the Scion brand.
Scion was a way to market certain Toyotas. It’s become irrelevant in this market where small cars are becoming commodities. Who gets excited about small cars these days? It’s like shopping for toilet paper.
I don’t know if anybody is having success right now. But that’s not the point. The point is the reason for dropping the brand is NOT because of parents influencing their kids’ choices. Saying that makes only adds to the perception of your bias against other manufacturers. Sure you clarify your thoughts in the comments here, but the original piece reads like something from a Toyota fanboy forum.
I’m not even sure “kids” (dis)respecting thier parents choice in car brands is relevant either way, The same year my father bought a new Toyota Corolla, (1979) I was on my SECOND Buick Electra, A reversal of what one would think. and luckily for me 1971 Electras were damned near ‘free’ that year!
My 2 almost 30 year old children drive the same type of cars my wife and I own, Ford Taurus, Tempos and Escorts. I mostly avoided Fords for the first 40 years of driving(did have a 62 Fairlane SW that to this day wish I still owned) and then ended up with all Fords after almost 40 years of Ramblers and Mopars with a brief fling with Toyota(’69) & Dodge Colts(’72&’76).
Correct. There was little or no incremental cost in maintaining Scion. And no cost in pulling the plug. The product continue to be sold as Toyotas. Scion wasn’t really ever a “brand”; it was a way of marketing certain Toyotas.
And I disagree with DeLorenzos comments. “Life support” assumes that a lot of money is being injected to keep something alive. Not exactly the case here.
But Scion has been just about every blogger’s whipping post since the xB’s replacement failed to equal the original. And I fault Toyota for the inability to see what made the original appealing, and not be able to build a proper successor.
But as has been noted, the low end of the market is turning into a commodity market, and Scion has no relevance in that anymore. It’s a distraction.
The Pontiac was only discontinued because of the upcoming bankruptcy issue. Sales wise, it was good until the end. Oldsmobile was selling well despite the overlapping products at the time.
Not. It was a big money-loser. That was quite well confirmed. Bankruptcy allowed them to ditch it without the usual huge expense of closing a whole brand.
And Olds was losing money like mad too. Which is why GM was willing to spend over a billion dollars to close it. It’s called “cutting your losses”.
Pontiac at the time, there were considerations about turning it into a niche brand but that proposal was turned down in the congress. With the upcoming deadline at the time, the later proposal was rushed to the congress with the elimination of Pontiac afterwards under the new GM.
Pontiac was transferred to General Motors Company eventually, unlike Hummer and Saturn belonging to Motors Liquidation Company( formerly General Motors Corporation ), and legally it is possible for General Motors Company to restart the brand. And in the current Tech center, Pontiac still has presence in the form of sketches on table and wall.
Don’t hold your breath for the return of Pontiac. That would be a deadly sin. 🙂
I liked Pontiac. They usually didn’t live up to their marketing, and were more often than not rather tacky, but they at least attempted to be stylish.
“Not your father’s Oldsmobile” has become “not your grandfather’s Buick.” Or something.
So when are we going to start seeing Deadly Sins of Scion? We have had them for just about every other orphan brand over the years…
I did it back in 2007. And re-posted it here: https://www.curbsideclassic.com/curbside-classics-asian/curbside-classicreview-2008-scion-xb-a-case-study-for-how-to-kill-enthusiasm/
Frankly, except for the gen2 xB, which was not a bad car per se, just a poor follow-up to a rather brilliant little car, none of the Scions qualify as Deadly Sins, because it wasn’t the cars that killed Scion (unlike at GM). They were all Toyotas, and almost inevitably at or near the top of CR’s reliability rankings.
What killed Scion is that it was an iffy idea in the first place, and the iffiness of it became ever more iffy. It just didn’t make sense anymore.
It’s not analogous to GM in just about any way. One might be tempted to compare it to Saturn, but again, it’s a completely different thing. GM tried to create a new car company, because they couldn’t make cars that could compete with the Japanese. GM lost over $10 billion in that failed experiment.
Scion was just a way to market Toyotas. It cost them very little to start doing so, and it will cost them nothing to stop. And they undoubtedly made money on the cars.
The only way Scion could truly be a DS if it killed or severely damaged Toyota. That’s certainly not the case.
Of course it was the cars! You yourself have said that a Deadly Sin need not be a bad car, but only a car that missed the mark or the market. By that standard, every Scion except the first xB was a deadly sin. They were all basic palate swaps of some Toyota, except with some added faux youthfulness. More to the point, there was never any reason to buy any Scion over a Toyota, except for the first xB. The second xB was simply an inferior offering in that offbeat square utility car market of the mid-2000s (the only remaining member of which is the Kia Soul).
You’re right that Scion didn’t severely damage Toyota. But then, few of GM’s Deadly Sins individually severely damaged the company. The GM Deadly Sins compounded are what did them in. Had they gotten their act together after, say, Citation, GM would have been in a much better place going into the 1990s, which would have put them in a much better place going into Carpocalypse.
You’re misinterpreting my words. Every GM deadly Sin had some (or many) intrinsic faults or weaknesses that materially caused the company to lose market share and thereby eventually fail.
Would you like to point out how Toyota has lost market share in the past dozen years since starting the Scion sub-brand?
As I’ve said before, everyone just loves to pile on Scion, because the latent hate for Toyota, for being so successful, is just huge. yes, the gen2 xB did not live up to the first one, but it’s also possible that the interest in that type of vehicle was not really a long term one. It was something of a fad, as time has proven. But one weak car does not make failure for the whole of Toyota.
The point is: Scion’s lack of long-term success is essentially a sole pimple on Toyota’s smiling, beautiful face. And now they’ve popped it. Good riddance, but in NO WAY, has Scion damaged or hurt Toyota. Except of course, in the eyes of endless bloggers and commenters, who are always salivating to find a blemish on Toyota’s face/success.
Does anyone think that the cars that were sold as Scions would have sold materially better if they had been branded as Toyotas? Not me.
Another interesting tidbit about Toyota haters online: none of them buy new cars anyway. Kind of like how guys living in basement suites and working at Walmart tell me the financial will collapse, making paper money worthless.
Toyota makes massive profit for its shareholders.
“Does anyone think that the cars that were sold as Scions would have sold materially better if they had been branded as Toyotas? Not me.” That kinda makes my point for me. At the end of the day, Toyota pumped money into Scion, and that well came up dry. The fact that it didn’t crash Toyota into the wall is not the point. Had Toyota had a string of mess-ups beforehand, it might have been something.
And that’s the whole point-none of GM’s Deadly Sins, if taken in isolation, would have destroyed a healthy GM. GM’s problem wasn’t that it made the Citation. GM’s problem was that it made the Citation, and the Oldsmobile diesel, and the Cadillac V8-6-4, and the HT-4100, and the Cimarron, and the second Seville, and the 1986 Riviera, and the W cars, and on and on and on.
Treating one company’s fuck-ups as a blip and another’s as, literally, Deadly Sins is disingenuous. The only difference between GM’s fuck-ups and Toyota’s fuck-ups are that GM made a whole lot more of them for a much more sustained period of time. Taken as a whole, GM’s show us that there were massive issues up and down GM from at least the 1970s onward. Saturn is Deadly Sin #4. How did Saturn materially cost GM market share? Or perhaps a better question-how is Scion substantively different from Saturn? Both were launched with a new car that did well and attracted a following. Both spent their later years peddling weak palate-swaps of their corporate brethren. Both existed for roughly similar lengths of time on the market (17 years and 13 years, respectively), and both had recent or upcoming products that had potential to juice the brand a bit before the ref finally got the three-count.
If we were having this conversation in 1980, without any knowledge of what was really happening inside GM or any knowledge of what was in the General’s future, the Olds diesel would be a blip, not a Deadly Sin. There might be chatter about whether GM was cheapening the cars to try and increase profits/retain share/fight off new competitors, but it would only be chatter. And if we’re being honest, that same sort of chatter, that’s only chatter, exists around Toyota right now. By and large, Toyotas are considered very good, and their issues have, to date, not been so frequent as to suggest the company’s in jeopardy.
Every GM Deadly Sin did not cause the company to lose market share and eventually fail. Consistently fucking up, releasing a consistent string of Deadly Sins one after the next, caused the company to lose market share and fail. That’s a substantive difference. My grandfather is a glutton (he loves his Southern Comfort). He’s also 92. One Deadly Sin hasn’t sent him to Saint Peter’s gate yet. Had he also been slothful and lustful (instead of preparing to celebrate his 73rd anniversary) and had a temper, perhaps he’d have had a much worse go of it.
I think part of why people like to pile on Toyota and Honda is because it seems like a disproportionately large number of their owners act as though their proverbial shit doesn’t stink. I owned a Honda Element for eight years. It was a fine car, one I was happy to buy, one I enjoyed, and one which I do not regret buying. My Element was no more reliable than any of the four GM vehicles I owned, and it had major problems much earlier in its life than any of the four GM vehicles I owned. A friend of mine had a 2003 Camry, and while it was reliable, it was a wretched car.
And then I go to NAIAS and sit in the cars and I see Fords nicer than Lexuses and Acuras, let alone Toyotas and Hondas. Hell, even the Malibu, which I dislike on so many levels including their mix-and-match nice and shit material interiors and stupid-looking exteriors, was nicer than anything wearing a Toyota badge on the show floor. We see Toyota and Honda having the same reliability as Ford, and vice versa, and I can’t for the life of me figure why anyone would buy a Camry when Fusion exists. And yes, I’ve driven a ’15 Camry (in Oregon, no less). It’s a pale copy of a 2012 Fusion.
It irks me, and many others, when people overlook flaws in or mistakes made by Toyota or Honda but are quick to bag on every misstep Ford or GM ever makes. Toyotas are fine enough cars, but they haven’t been head-and-shoulders better than other cars out there for 10 years now.
Salivating to find a blemish on Toyota’s face? No. Willing to point out a Toyota fuck-up? Yes.
What money did the “pump into Scion”? The ads just said “Scion” instead of “Toyota”. No incremental costs there.
The reality is that Toyota undoubtedly made the same profit on Scions as if they had been sold as Toyotas. There was no incremental cost difference.
To compare Scion to Saturn is a joke. And a very bad one. If you can’t tell the difference, I feel sorry for you. No wonder your time in the industry was short.
Saturn’s cumulative losses were in the $10-12 billion range. Get it? That’s a very Deadly Sin indeed, from beginning to end. Starting a whole new car company with its own factory and dealer network is NOTHING like selling a few of your existing cars in one corner of your showroom with a different badge on it.
I’m not going to waste any more time with you. The simple fact is that Scion clearly didn’t turn out to be a very brilliant marketing scheme, which is all it was. But it did not cause ANY damage to Toyota, and quite likely added incremental sales. The xB sold quite well in its early years, and it would almost certainly never have been sold here except for Scion.
You (and so many others) are desperate to to sling shit at Toyota. Hey; they’re hardly perfect. Sure they’ve made mistakes. But in this business, like others, it’s the batting average that counts. And Toyota’s has been better than anyone else’s. Right? Or how do you account for their huge success?
Hey, it’s not just me saying that Scion and Saturn have a lot in common. Here’s Autoblog and the Wall Street Journal saying the same thing:
http://www.autoblog.com/2016/02/03/scion-toyota-death-opinion/
http://www.wsj.com/articles/toyota-ending-scion-brand-1454511571
Also, I’ve discovered the amount of umbrage with which one reacts to a notion they don’t like is a great indication of how “close to home” the comment was. The fact that you’re now resorting to personal ad hominem attacks speaks volumes.
xequar: Another good reason why I don’t read Autoblog or WSJ, as if I needed more.
If you (or they) can’t distinguish between a multi-billion $ effort to create a new car company from scratch, with its own R&D, production facilities and separate dealer network from slapping on a different badge on a few cars that already existed in a marketing effort that cost no more than advertising them as Toyotas, than it really is pathetic. Sorry if that offends you, but it’s just the reality.
Paul: Disagreement does not offend me. Disagreement leads to conversation leads to learning or educating. I’m not saying you have to agree with WSJ or Autoblog, just pointing out that prominent sources saw fit to make the same comparison I made. Perhaps you think there’s nothing to it, but at the very least it’s there to be made.
“To compare Scion to Saturn is a joke. And a very bad one. If you can’t tell the difference, I feel sorry for you. No wonder your time in the industry was short.
Saturn’s cumulative losses were in the $10-12 billion range. Get it?”
In order to feel sympathy for someone, you have to presume they’re harmed or damaged or lacking in some way. Suggesting that I’m so lacking in capability that it’s obvious and correct I’m no longer working with Ford, well, that’s a straight-up insult. Making sure I “get it,” just in case I’m too slow to follow you besides? You used a lot of words to say you think I’m stupid. I’ve been called far worse by people much closer to and much more impactful in my life, and I have a thick skin. I know my history, I know what I’m capable of, I know what I’ve accomplished and will accomplish.
So no, I’m not offended. I am surprised and a little disappointed that the owner of a website where the conversation’s normally a bit more cordial and high-brow and learned than at, say, Jalopnik was apparently so incensed by an idea with which he disagreed that he felt it necessary to all but straight-up call me stupid. It was completely unnecessary and contributed nothing of value.
And for the record, I don’t consider eight years, a tenure I ended on very good terms and of my own accord to pursue (and ultimately earn) a master’s degree, short. (If anything, toiling in windowless rooms doing unimportant things for eight years felt like an eternity. But, I also got to see a cross-sectional view of the company that very few people ever get to see while doing those unimportant things, so it wasn’t all bad.)
How did Saturn cost GM market share?
GM spent money on Saturn instead of keeping Chevrolet abreast of Ford, let alone Honda, Nissan and Toyota.
The Chevrolet Cavalier thus doddered on for over a decade without major changes while Honda, Nissan and Toyota were revamping the Civic, Sentra and Corolla, respectively, like clockwork every four years. Even Ford kept making improvements to the Escort.
(And, for all of the money spent on Saturn, when the Saturn S-Series did appear, it wasn’t any better than the Mazda-based, second-generation Escort. In some ways it was inferior to the Escort. Chevrolet, meanwhile, was still stuck selling a slightly restyled version of the original Cavalier.)
It’s also telling that GM lost a large amount of market share in the late 1980s, and the debut of Saturn in the early 1990s did nothing to stop that slide.
Then the original Saturn S-Series stuck around for far too long, but as sales slid, GM didn’t change it. Most likely because Saturn was losing money.
Toyota never let the Corolla and Camry rot because it was spending money to develop and roll out Scion.
I suppose it then becomes what your definition of is is, etc. lol Scions were not bad cars, from a reliability standpoint, but they could have been bad for other reasons. Clearly the problem with Scion was one of primarily brand identity. What was the reason to buy said vehicle because it was called a Scion and not a Toyota? Toyota called their luxury brand Lexus in the United States because they knew they could never justify selling those cars for those prices by still calling them Toyotas. Even though until recently they were all sold as Toyotas even in Japan. GM, Ford, Chrysler, of course suffered from quality issues in the 80s, among other things the loss of the ability to sell cars that the public had identified them with due to fuel economy concerns, environmental regulations, and the demographic changes. But the biggest reason why we don’t have Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Saturn, Mercury, Plymouth, etc. is because their unique brand identities vanished. By the 1980s, there was essentially no real difference between a Plymouth and a Dodge. Eventually there became nothing really special about a Scion that couldn’t be a Toyota. Voila.
It’s not analogous to GM in just about any way. One might be tempted to compare it to Saturn, but again, it’s a completely different thing. GM tried to create a new car company, because they couldn’t make cars that could compete with the Japanese. GM lost over $10 billion in that failed experiment.
I think the comparison to Saturn is apt. Both companies already made compact cars, but tried to create a “different kind of car company” selling compact cars by appealing to a younger buyer, with different products and no haggle pricing
The fact that GM lost a boatload of money on Saturn, while Toyota may not have taken such a bath, is just the difference between how GM did things, which put them in Chapter 11, vs the way Toyota does things, which has them as the largest vehicle maker in the world with an enviable profit margin.
Our local Kia dealer is a “no-haggle” dealer. It’s a noble idea but it doesn’t work when your prices on the window are are simlar to the prices on the windows of the “Haggle-friendly” dealers next door.
Scion’s dying because of lack of product, plain and simple.
The original xB was a neat little car, one that I was very interested in. By the time I was ready to buy my first new car, though, they’d unveiled the second-gen xB. The second xB was a large beast with a stupid interior and a speedometer in the middle and less utility but equally bad mileage as a Honda Element. And I liked the look of the Element from the day it came out.
So I, as the poster child for Scion’s (and Honda Element’s) desired demographic, went and bought a Honda Element. (The Element is another story unto itself, but ultimately I regret neither the choice to buy it nor the choice to part ways with it after eight years and 144,000 miles.) If Toyota/Scion couldn’t convince 25-year-old active cyclist lover of quirky vehicles me to buy their car, well, they didn’t stand a chance.
The first xB was the one cool vehicle that Scion ever had. The others were just slightly jazzier Toyota cars. The second xB… I’ve already covered my distaste for it. And now, the previously-upcoming cars do absolutely nothing for me.
On the legality front, a car’s registration doesn’t necessarily mean much about the car. I mean, my Honda Element and my mom’s TrailBlazer are both station wagons according to the State of Michigan and my Fiesta ST isn’t even a Fiesta on the title (it’s just a Ford, model “Four Door”). There are plenty of registered brand marks in the United States for Scion, including for a automotive financial services company (as in, Toyota at one point at least intended to have Scion have its own finance company).
At any rate, Scion’s been dead for 10 years now. Glad someone’s finally reading the eulogy.
I dunno, those FR-S es seem pretty popular around here, though as mentioned the Toyota brand would have been more popular, (to the point of people rebadging their own cars) cause ‘JDM’ is cool and Scion’s …not a JDM name. 🙂
Two things:
1. I imagine this is going to annoy all the dealers who remodeled their showrooms to accommodate the brand.
2. Does this also mean an end to the no haggle policy of Scion? Its not a perfect policy, but not having to haggle has some definite benefits, although given Scion’s mediocre sales, not many people felt that way.
The “re-modeling” I saw looked like free-standing dividers. Just yank them out. That’s the beauty of Scion; pulling the plug isn’t really going to cost anyone much.
^ I think this is somewhat the nut off the matter. Not a single dealership will disappear as a result of Scion closing. No buildings will be shuttered. Any forthcoming cars that might have been Scions in the future will still presumably be brought to market, albeit with Toyota badges.
Too, Scion’s history was simply too short to have created an emotional legacy. I was sad when Olds closed, due to its long history and my small relationship to it—my ’70 Rocket 455. Even if I was never going to buy another Olds, I got robbed of the pleasure of playing “remember when” when I’d drive past an Olds dealer. I’m not sure Paul will feel sentimental about Scion when he drives past a Toyota dealer, much as he likes his xB.
“No haggle”
No idea on where that goes.
I’d posit, however, that after your first purchase the haggle free thing isn’t such a big deal.
And as long as you have a dealership model, you need a way to dump inventory at the end of the season.
Gotta get used to the collapse of motor brands.
I’m old enough to remember:
Plymouth (my cloud car underdog)
Scion (too young for me)
Chrylser (on Sergio hit list)
Dodge (could use Mitsubishi for captive imports like the ’70s & ’80s)
Oldsmobile (RIP my good friend!)
Hummer (MPG hog!)
Saab (would the new start buttons have stayed on the console)
Pontiac (favorite of Avis/Hertz/National)
Mercury (still big time pissed about that one!!)
Lincoln (if the new Continental fails)
Datsun (aka Nissan)
Suzuki (eaten alive by the Great Recession)
Daewoo (never knew you)
Mitsubishi (on life support)
Daihatsu (only saw one in my entire life)
Who’s next???
I’ll say it one more time: Scion was never really a true “brand”; it was a way to market Toyotas. And they were legally Toyotas all along.
I’ll say it again, too. The words on your title or registration are really unimportant and convey little legal information. There are plenty of Scion brandmarks and trademarks registered with the United States government. Scion was marketed as a brand, treated as a brand, and viewed as a brand by the bulk of the public. Hell, Toyota at least contemplated a Scion auto financial services company, and they had the registered brandmark to show it.
http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4805:n9hx45.2.1
“Word Mark SCION FINANCIAL SERVICES”
“Goods and Services (ABANDONED) IC 036. US 100 101 102. G & S: Financing the purchase and leasing of motor vehicles; underwriting and administering insurance agreements, service agreements, prepaid maintenance agreements, and debt cancellation agreements, all related to motor vehicles”
All utterly meaningless.
And are you serious by saying The words on your title or registration are really unimportant and convey little legal information.
Tell that to the DMV, police, bank, or insurance company. What do the words on the title convey then?
As long as the VIN’s correct, the rest of it is largely of no consequence. Otherwise, I’d have had problems with pretty much every car I’ve owned given Michigan’s notable lack of information and lack of correct information on car titles. Hell, I literally had a Secretary of State employee right in front of me cross off a date of title transfer for a trailer and write in that day’s date, despite the fact that the correct date would have cost me an extra fee because I was registering it way more than 90 days after the sale.
What, exactly about Scions is different than any other Toyota besides the badge? The brandname was a distinction without a difference. The use of Genesis by Hyundai is a similar marketing ploy I think. Not long ago they were Hyundai cars with a Genesis model name. Now they have removed the Hyundai name from the exterior, but you still get it serviced at a Hyundai dealership.
Hyundai will eventually split of the genesis cars into its own separate brand/dealerships, to compete more directly with Lexus, etc.
Toyota never had that in mind. In fact, quite the opposite: Scion was intended as a way to get younger buyers into a Toyota dealership.
And the cars were/are all Toyotas. We probably wouldn’t have ever gotten the xB if though, if Scion hadn’t existed.
I respectfully disagree. I think that Toyota with Scion and Chrysler with RAM brands has shown the way of the future for vehicle branding exercises. Automakers can spin-up and shutter brands at relatively little expense and never have to go through a painful legal process as when Plymouth, Oldsmobile or Pontiac were shuttered.
I predict that Genesis will not be legally separated as a “brand” under your strict definition, Paul. The VIN and possibly ownership will still show the vehicles as being Hyundai, but the consumer literature and vehicle badging will depict Genesis as the brand. Dealerships will probably be required to have a separate showroom for Genesis cars, but I’d also speculate that there won’t be fully independent Genesis dealers.
BOC: If Genesis moves out of Hyundai dealers and creates its own dealer network, they will have no choice. Look guys, the single most important thing that defines a true “brand” is that it has actual dealers, who sign very complex (and demanding) franchise agreements. The dealers then spend millions to create dealerships based on those contracts.
Scion avoided all of that because it’s not a true brand.
That alone is the single biggest difference. There are no separate Scion dealer/franchise contracts.
As I said, the whole thing boils down to legalities, not your perception of what a brand is. Sorry, but Toyota didn’t ask your opinion when they created (and closed) the Scion sub brand.
Toyota never had that in mind because Scions weren’t exactly stampeding out of the showroom or earning massive profits, had the XB or TC or BS or whatever been that kind of successes whose to say they wouldn’t be spun off, or that if the Genesis were a meager seller it would just remain a nice car in the Hyundai lineup until it was phased out.
This is all an argument of semantics, on both sides. On one hand by the technical requirements of being a brand, Scion was not quite one, but from the basic webster definition of brand Scion definitely is, and it was even “branded” with the symbol(just using adhesive tape instead of a red hot iron)
“Words on the title?” Hmm.
My Mazda 3 was registered as a sedan, when anybody could see it was a hatchback and always had been. Always wondered about the potential implications of that.
Old Pete: The DMV here doesn’t distinguish between sedans and hatchbacks. They do between certain other classes of vehicles. it’s a nit-picking issue.
What’s important is the name of the manufacturer on the title, as that is critical.
What a strange list. It includes actual shuttered brands as well as your own future predictions. Chrysler as a brand is not going anywhere, at least not in the near future. If anything, Sergio has it out for Dodge. He is starving Dodge of product and causing more brand overlap. Separated off Ram trucks, killing the Caravan and Viper, taking Chrysler brand downmarket into traditional Dodge territory. At this point, I doubt Lincoln is going t o disappear either.
I forgot:
Saturn (also killed by the Great Recession)
Also, does it really matter if you call it:
division
marquis
brand
Any profits (if any) roll up to a “very few” corporations:
GM
Ford
FCA
Tara Motors
Toyota
Honda
Nissan/Renault (cross joint holdings)
PSA
Daimler Benz
BMW
There are others, but the above represents 80-85% of the volume of passenger cars and light trucks with the Chinese nipping at their heels
Ford no longer owns a majority share of Mazda, so they should be on that list, unless you consider them to be too small. Also you forgot Fuji Heavy Industries (Subaru), Hyundai (a pretty big omission), and VAG (the second largest automaker in the world).
Apologies to Fuji, Mazda, and Hyundai.
Also, I forgot VW in the list of “very few” corporations: (VW, Audi, Lamborghini, Bugatti, some of Porsche, SEAT, Škoda, etc).
Again, it all rolls up to a “very few” corporations.
For a list of auto corporations by volume for 2013, follow this link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry
I don’t know what a title of French nobility has to do with anything, so I have to assume you meant to say “marque.”
A combination of the spelling feature “taking control” and poor proof reading!
So Paul, will you be starting the Scion Drivers Club or some other aggregation of folks who will revel in ownership of an orphan? At least you can now join those of us who occasionally guzzle beer and reminisce about the great Mercuries, Oldsmobiles, Pontiacs, DeSotos, AMCs and Studebakers of our youth. 🙂
I am curious – is there a Scion dealer anywhere that was not part of an existing Toyota dealer? Everywhere in Central Indiana that you could buy a Scion was also the same place where you could buy a Toyota.
The harm done (in my estimation) was the wasted opportunity to re-invigorate the Toyota brand with the vehicles that wore Scion badges instead. As always, the way to bring younger buyers into a brand’s showroom is to offer vehicles that appeal to younger buyers. If it worked with Chrysler, it can work anywhere.
I am curious – is there a Scion dealer anywhere that was not part of an existing Toyota dealer?
No; Scion was never a separate “brand”; it was just a way to aggregate and market certain Toyotas. They are legally all Toyotas. Only those Toyota dealers that wanted to sell Scions partitioned a part of their show room with some dividers and sold Scions from there. And one or two of the sales staff was trained to be “Scion Specialists”.
Otherwise, it was all the same; service, parts, etc…
Me? Frankly, I’ve always thought of my car as a Toyota. maybe I’ll get Toyota badges for it. 🙂
You know better than most of us, you own a Scion.
Does your state register the Scion brand as a “make”? If so, I’d call it a brand or a “make” to the extent that there is a legal definition.
But, it seems to me to fit the old GM “companion” brand business model of the 1930s. The new brands generally did not get their own dealer network. I’d agree with your interpretation of the intent of Scion as a sub brand in today’s parlance.
I believe the 1990s GEO worked similarly at Chevrolet as Scion did at Toyota. In Nebraska, they were titled as GEOs for several years.
NO! How many times do I have to repeat myself? All Scions are titled and registered as Toyotas. legally, they are Toyotas. They just don’t have the badge applied to them.
Scion is not a legal “brand”, like say Dodge, or Lexus. It’s a sub-brand. Not unlike the Prius family, except they still have a Toyota badge on them.
Is this really that complicated or hard to understand? 🙂
Unless you’re driving to every toyota dealer in the tri-state area, have memorized the Toyota designator in the vin number, let alone look at the vin numbers of every Toyota/Scion you come across, and scour the internet for the real story on what Scion is under the Toyota umbrella, yeah it kinda is.
Scion owners, Toyota employees, and DMV workers are all who really see the two as one in the same. Out in the real world, random cars on the street have Scion badges, and the brand isn’t on the Toyota website when Joe Blow looks it up.
Scion was only a US market badge for certain Toyota models we have the same cars here with Toyota and sometimes Daihatsu badging, The only saving for Toyota will be in brochure printing and signage for cars and dealerships, the cars will continue as usual.
Missed the point about titles in the article. Sort of doubles down on the pointlessness of the Scion brand.
I wonder if that ever bothered law enforcement?
Nope, no problems whatsoever.
Besides, Toyota wasn’t the first to badge it a Scion, but title it a Toyota.
GM was doing that back in the Ninties. My ’93 Geo Metro said Chevrolet on the title and owner’s card (in Pennsylvania, at least, and most likely the other 49 states). And I don’t believe anybody had a stand-alone Geo dealership. They were all in Chevrolet showrooms.
Paul, I think you’re in the minority on this POV, and I don’t know why you’re harping on the point that Scion wasn’t a “real” brand. To some extent, all car brands under their respective parent company are a marketing exercise. Especially so today, when even GM brands, which were once almost autonomous companies themselves, must share almost everything today.
The first 3 digits of a VIN are the World Manufacturer Index (WMI). According to the following webpage, codes JTK and JTL are registered specifically to Scion. So at least some Scion-branded vehicles have Scion-specific VINs. (I realize that, in a more generic sense, everything starting with “JT” = Japanese-built Toyota.)
http://www.autocalculator.org/VIN/WMI.aspx#.VrJPyk9i9So
RAM is not a “real” brand. There is no RAM in this list; RAM trucks still have Dodge VINs according to their WMI. There are no separate RAM dealerships (that I am aware of). If a RAM owner needs parts or service, they go to a Dodge dealership. Everyone simply accepts that RAM is separate from Dodge now because FCA said so.
I could argue all day that new RAM trucks are actually Dodges, but almost nobody really cares. (If I wanted to be a real crackpot, I could argue that my truck is Canadian so it should be called a Fargo and have some custom badges printed up.) Same as Scion. Nobody really cares what a VIN decoder or even the ownership would tell you. That’s just paperwork. The badge on the car says “Scion”, and if you asked most owners I bet they would say they drive a Scion such-and-such. Toyota just structured the Scion brand to make it easier to euthanize it later if the experiment didn’t work out, which is exactly what they’re doing.
Either it’s a real brand, or it isn’t, with all that goes with that. Anyone who really knows the difference will understand what I’m saying. Your perception of what a brand is does not equal what a brand is from a legal/business perspective.
Real brands have complex business relationships with their dealers, the government, etc.. None of those apply to Scion, hence they can shut it down without violating any franchise laws. That alone is a HUGE difference. Scion was not a franchise, and din’t have its own dealers and, all the attendant obligations and expenses.
I’m tired of trying to explain it…just keep believing Scion was a real brand. Makes life easier for all of us.
Your perception of something is your reality. You have a particular perception based on a strict legal understanding, but Toyota presented Scion to consumers as a unique brand, not a sub-brand. The only people who care strongly about this topic would be Toyota/Scion dealers, those with a legal interest in automotive brands, and enthusiasts who in this case want to replace their Scion badging with Toyota badging anyhow.
Given your strong feelings on this, I am curious about something: I see that Scion has already been added to the list of shuttered automotive brands on Wikipedia. Would you say that it doesn’t deserve to be listed there since it doesn’t meet the criteria?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_automobile_manufacturers_of_the_United_States
OMG, can you just please drop this already? Dude, if I took everything at Wikipedia at face value, I would have made an idiot out myself a long time ago. Just about anyone can edit these posts.
Scion obviously does not belong on that list as Scion legally was truly not a “manufacturer”. Period. Ask the government. Or the dealers. Did you read the name of this list? It says “Defunct Manufacturers of the United States” Even if Toyota went belly up, it wouldn’t belong on that list.
Who was the doofus who added Scion? Hopefully not you. Although since it must have been added in the past few hours, how did you come to know about it? Was it you?
All of which is my whole point. Scions are actually Toyotas, legally. Hence it’s not considered a manufacturer for many very important legal and business reasons.
I understand that many folks perceive Scion as a brand. Fine; whatever. My point (as always) is to shed some light and factual info on this situation. Which is that Scion is a sub brand, and that is quite different legally and business-wise. I’m personally more interested in how the car business really works, not the average Joe’s impressions of it.
Toyota clearly set up Scion so that there would be little or no incremental costs in doing so, and little or no costs in closing it. That’s the really key take-away. meaning, from a business POV, Toyota didn’t lose anything with Scion; they probably net gained, at least in the early years. The xB sold very well for the first few years. That alone is a couple hundred thousand more sales than if they hadn’t done it. And they certainly didn’t lose any money in recent years, as there was no incremental cost in selling these Toyotas as Scions.
That’s my whole point: this has NOT been a financial/business/profit negative for Toyota. It wasn’t a particularly brilliant move, but it never hurt them either except in the eyes of the many Toyota haters, who want to make out that this is some Deadly Sin, or comparable to Saturn, which cost GM $10-12 billion in losses.
Can I please get to some other work now???
BOC: Perhaps the fact that you live in Canada makes you somewhat less than qualified to comment so vociferously on this subject? it’s really about US law, franchise laws, and contract law, among other legalities. And US market conditions and perceptions.
Maybe it’s different in Canada?
Can I please get to some other work now???
In a minute 🙂 I have a few retorts/questions for you:
1. I don’t believe nor propagate that Scion did damage to Toyota, and I really don’t see many in our so called hate group saying that either. What I question is whether it was ever necessary in the first place to sell cars like the XB and those to follow, which were all badged Toyota elsewhere outside America, and if they were badged Toyotas do you believe they would have been LESS successful in American markets?
2. Your perspective from an inner workings business perspective indisputable, but the thing is you can’t be dismissive of average Joe when it comes to brands or sub brands. Brands are created and destroyed based on the buying habits of average Joes, the business just tries to figure out how to cater to them profitably. When average Joe is looking at your Xbox in traffic wondering what it is, he’ll see a badge that says Scion on it. So he or she looks up Scion on Scion’s devoted website, finds the XB, and if sold on it seeks it out and finds that they happen to be sold at Toyota dealers… up to that point they may very well have believed it was a different brand, and still may until they start signing papers. Perception and branding are intertwined.
What I question is whether it was ever necessary in the first place to sell cars like the XB and those to follow, which were all badged Toyota elsewhere outside America, and if they were badged Toyotas do you believe they would have been LESS successful in American markets?
No. and No.
I’ve repeatedly said here today in my comments that Scion was a dumb idea. I understand what they were trying to do. And it really didn’t cost them anything in the process. It was an experiment.
On the other hand, I doubt that Toyota would have brought over the xB if it hadn’t been for Scion. They sold several hundred thousand of them, all incremental sales (if you assume they wouldn’t have brought it over otherwise).
I understand your second point. And I agree (and always have) that Scion was kind of dumb, and not worthwhile. The issue here today is that folks are comparing it to Saturn and other GM divisions, or making out to be some huge fuck up. It really wasn’t; just a fairly harmless little fuck up.
They should have just sold all these cars as Toyotas, which would have benefited the brand better.
And as two others have pointed out, it’s most comparable to GEO (which were also tilted as Chevrolets). Again, there was probably some benefit to Chevy dealers in the short run, but it didn’t really pan out either. And it also didn’t hurt or cost much either. Totally different than Saturn.
Hold on a second “dude”. I think we are talking past each other, at least in part because you really want to argue. We have more common ground on this topic than you think though.
First off, from a technical and legal perspective, I AGREE WITH YOU. I can even sympathize with your POV because RAM isn’t a “real brand”, and I hope that one day it is folded back into Dodge as Toyota is doing with Scion. But manufacturers are trying to give the perception that these are distinct brands. To an individual, their perception of reality IS THEIR reality. If you want to change their perception so they think of it as “Toyota Scion” instead of just “Scion”, you need to get on your soapbox and preach it (which you have)… but expect a lot of confused reactions.
I also agree that Scion was a rather dumb idea, but was no great loss to parent Toyota. I said as much in one of my other comments. Scion is definitely not comparable to GM’s Saturn experiment in terms of wasted resources or unhappy customers. There are a few interesting parallels (no-haggle pricing, focus on small cars, rebadging imports which Saturn did in later years) which arguably portended Scion’s eventual failure, but that’s getting off-topic.
My other point was that you should expect to see more of these type of quasi-brands in the future. (Hyundai) Genesis is a good example. They’re easier for the parent companies to manage from a legal and business perspective, and if things don’t go well they’re infinitely easier to shutter than a “real brand” with separate franchise agreement, etc. Will it hurt Genesis’ image if they must be co-located with a Hyundai dealership? Since you’re interested in how the auto business really works, I presume that should be a salient question to you.
I’ll admit that I found the wiki article (google shuttered automotive brands) and threw the link out there just to see what you’d do with it, and I apologize for egging you on Paul. I guess that was a bridge too far, as you resorted to personal attacks, accusing me of doctoring the list to add Scion myself (I am not that doofus), then discrediting my comments on the basis of my nationality.
Since parts and service support will continue it’s really no problem for Scion owners.
So you get orphan “bragging rights” but without concerns about keeping the car long term,and this really shouldn’t hurt resale value. So Paul can still keep the xB on the road for years to come if he want’s to!
I think if the original xB has appeared as a Toyota, the quantity of cars sold would have been about the same anyway.
The Scion is so Toyota that they share the same shape of the badge base.
That’s good its about time and good riddance. Toyota should have really moved the Mazda 2/Demio based and badged equipped iA into Toyota Yaris 4 Door Sedan just like the Canadian version. The Scion iM into Toyota Auris or Blade Hatchback. The Scion FR-S into Toyota 86 in the first place during the 2016 model year. Toyota should have done these sooner than later ever since the xB was discontinued in 2015.
I figure Toyota realized, when kids are actually sticking Toyota 86 badges from overseas on their Scions, the ‘youth branding’ is over. 🙂 (Though I never really understood why they thought the kids would be into that name in the first place. 🙂 )
Agreed. And it obviously wasn’t a hot idea in the first place, although I doubt we would have ever gotten the original xB if it wasn’t for Scion.
I assumed it was a play on the city of Zion from The Matrix, which were THE big movies among my peers around the time the Scion brand was launched. The Toyota Matrix kinda fuels that suspicion of mine.
I always said if I bought a FR/S I’d buy the 86 badging with it, guess I won’t have to if I hold out for a ’17 😀
You’re not serious? Do you know the definition of the word “scion”?
Keep in mind I was 15 when I came up with that theory 😀
Fair enough.
I’ve been joking I’d mix up some letters and make it a Scubayotaion. 🙂 (Really if I were in the market, yes, rear-drive, proper gearstick, fairly light car with something like a hatchback, sure I’d be interested. 🙂
Well well well 😀
I wonder if they’ll be swapping badges on cars currently in the pipeline.
No. For MY 2017, they will wear Toyota badges.
The only losers here are the Toyota dealers that spent (probably) hundreds of thousands of dollars converting their Toyota dealerships in to Toyota/Scion dealerships.
Look for lots of Scion ephemera on eBay soon.
Assuming they’re the original 2003 ones, they’ve probably amortized by now anyway.
Paul can you explain further? I’m not sure I understand what you mean when you say that Scion wasn’t its own brand – it wasn’t a Toyota Scion, it was a Scion. If you asked someone what they drove they would say a Scion, not a Toyota. Same for any other brand that is spun off the parent company, whether it is luxury or not.
It wasn’t technically/legally a separate brand. All Scions are titled/registered as Toyotas. That’s not the case with other brands.
It’s referred to as a “sub brand”. It’s really just a way to market certain Toyotas. But there are no separate dealers. There is no legal brand “Scion”, like Dodge, or Lexus.
It’s not really all that different than say the Prius family. Or Hyundai’s Genesis family. Or Ford’s F-series family. The only difference is there isn’t a Toyota badge on the Scions. But other than that, they are Toyotas.
But then again, The F-series, Genesis or Prius don’t have their own separate website from Ford, Hyundai, and Toyota.
https://www.hyundaiusa.com/genesis/
http://www.ford.com/trucks/f150/
http://www.toyota.com/prius/
Scion on the other hand does, just like any other separate division
https://www.scion.com/
Also, how do combined Scion/Toyota dealers differ from combined Lincoln/Mercury, or GMC/Pontiac, or even Dodge/Chrysler/Jeep/Fiat these days? Combined dealers seem to outnumber standalone brand dealers anyway, and have for quite some time at least where I live.
It’s not a “combined dealership” because Scion isn’t really a separate brand, and all of what that entails.
It’s not that hard of concept to understand…at least not for me.
The bottom line is that it cost Toyota little or nothing to start and market Scion, and it’s going to cost next to nothing to end. That alone is the big difference compared to other brands.
It cost GM over a billion $ to kill Olds.
To me, this seems to have the closest parallel. with Ford’s attempt from ’55 to ’60 to make “Continental” its own brand separate from Lincoln. The Mark II, and ’58-’60 Mark III/IV/V, were not Lincolns in any branding sense. Continental was its own nameplate, just like Imperial. But they were sold through Lincoln dealers and used Lincoln engines and non-specific parts. (No idea what they were titled as or considered by the DMV of the day!)
So when Ford decided to bring the Continental back under the Lincoln umbrella officially in ’61, it cost them nothing except for some letterhead and signage. And the products of the short-lived Continental Division are considered Lincolns by all (except pedants like ourselves), and even welcome in Lincoln clubs and events. Scion will probably be seen in a very similar light 50 years down the road.
If half the cars in the dealership are on one side with a different badge, and others are on the other with their own, it pretty much looks exactly like any combined dealership I’ve ever spent time in.
A different division, in the modern sense, IS branding. The engineering, styling and marketing between a Jeep or a Dodge come from the same place, only difference really is some have a standalone dealer network and the burden of establishment, but that’s less and less the case with every passing year. Oldsmobile still had a whole slew of standalone dealers when the plug was pulled, compared to say Mercury who was able to simply move Fords into the vacant spots of existing Lincoln/Mercury showrooms.
But yes, even Toyota’s blunders are brilliant!
Chris M., for the same reasons I thought of Imperial. I don’t know the historical specifics, so maybe I’m mistaken. But I’ve never understood the indignation some express when others call those years of Imperial that lacked a Chrysler badge a Chrysler. Close enough, in my book.
Chris: it’s not comparable to Continental. Ford took a major bath on that. They created a separate division, with its own headquarters, etc. They may have used some Ford parts, but the cost of developing the MkII was very large, and Ford lost money on each and every one. And then they had costs to close it all down.
As I’ve said repeatedly, Scions are all cars that already existed, and were sold in other parts of the world as Totyotas or Daihatsus. They spent very little to kick it off; on-going costs were advertising and marketing, which would have been the same if the ads said Toyota on them.
There is no reason to think that Toyota didn’t sell all of these Scions profitably. It just doesn’t make sense to continue it. But there are no losses involved, like the was with Continental.
mfred: Because during those years, they truly were a legally separate brand, meaning the titles said “Imperial”, not “Chrysler”. It’s a technicality, but one that Imperial fans take very seriously. 🙂
Were there distinct Imperial dealerships? I’m guessing not.
How about companion makes?
I’m not knowledgeable on the technicalities of “Companion makes”. Long before my time. I have no idea how they were titled and such.
And I try to avoid making assumptions based on my perceptions and opinions alone. 🙂
Toyota may be right that the kiddos are following their parents lead in cars, at least here in the Midwest. My high school / college kids love our F-150 and our 2002 Dodge Durango.
The kids all want trucks, CUVs and SUVs, and are buying the brands their parents have. the Jeep brand is HOT with this crowd. The old and current style Ford Escape is also very popular.
Our high school parking lot has interesting segregations. The trucks all park on the south end, the Jeeps in another spot (with the Wranglers in their own sub spot), the utilities in another zone, and the passenger cars have subsections for Ponies, econo boxes, and hand-me-down practical sedans – heavy on Accord, Civic, and Camry.
That sounds kinda neat. In my HS the back two rows closest to the road were populated entirely by pickup trucks. The row closest to the building was seniors-only, but those seniors that had trucks preferred to park farther out because they wouldn’t have to worry about parking straight or taking up multiple spaces. So every car in the senior row was a car–a lot of Monte Carlos, Grands Prix, various import sedans, and then a solitary compact CUV rising above the low roofs.
Yep, that senior vs. vehicle segment division exists at my kid’s school. The seniors get the front row, but many prefer to park with their cohort.
My high school had completely separate parking lots for Juniors and seniors, still does.
I thought it was rather odd that Toyota was introducing a new brand at about the same time as other manufacturers were killing off excess brands. Plus, I can kinda see what they were trying to accomplish, but targeting young people who have the least money to spend on a new car seems like a questionable tactic. Some of their biggest competition would be CPO used cars, and aftermarket suppliers for customization parts. Then to hear that Scion wouldn’t budge on pricing and their financing terms weren’t the best would further tend to drive away Scion’s target demographic.
I do recall reading, when Scion was introduced, that Toyota had relatively little to lose in this experiment. They had structured Scion specifically so it would be easy to kill-off if it didn’t live up to their expectations, which is what we’re seeing today.
The move totally makes sense; kind of surprised it didn’t happen sooner. Though I have to wonder if the iM is going to get a nose job at some near future point and become the Corolla 5-door, because unless I’m seriously misunderstanding its underpinnings, that’s what it is. (Then again the Matrix was a tall Corolla 5-door and merited its own name, so…)
Also, the lack of rebeliousness among the current youth scares me. Creative Destruction is necessary and conformists aren’t very good at it. (Lest you think I’m casting stones, I didn’t have that rebellious spirit as a younger man, and I wish I had.)
The current E170 Corolla shares its New MC Platform with the E180 Auris (Scion iM), other than that I think it’s another car.
The Auris is only available as a 5-door hatchback and as a 5-door wagon.
Gasoline engines 1.3 liter naturally aspirated and a 1.2 liter turbo.
Diesel engines 1.4 liter Toyota and a 1.6 liter BMW.
Hybrid, same powertrain as the Prius.
Okay, that one confuses me even more. Both being C-segment hatchbacks, what is the difference between a Prius and a Hybrid Auris other than styling?
All I know is that the first gen Auris replaced the Corolla hatchback here in 2007. The second gen was introduced in 2012. There’s no Toyota Corolla model anymore in Europe.
Fact is that the Auris Hybrid has “elbowed out” the Prius, sort of. Note that the B-segment Yaris hatchback is also available as a hybrid.
The current Yaris Hybrid with a 1.5 liter gasoline engine. Plus a CVT transmission, of course.
Not much. Europeans like compact hatchbacks, and the Auris is a bit less compromised in terms of space efficiency, since it’s not as aerodynamic and has a shorter, more vertical tail.
It’s really about competing more directly against the Golf, and the hybrid version means Toyota can offer the same (or better) efficiency without using diesel. Which in the wake of the diesel scandal, can only help Toyota with the hybrid Auris. I wonder if sales of it are up?
The Auris is doing pretty well, but the truth is that it will never become a real threat to King-Golf.
Toyota has some catching-up to do in the crowded and fierce competition C-segment.
Gawd, this car looks so much better without all the ground effects rubbish they slapped on the “iM”. Maybe they can toss that junk out with the Scion label when the car gets renamed as a Toyota.
Any nose job will be for the Corolla sedan, which’ll be just about due for its’ midcycle refresh for 2017, to bring it in line with the hatchback since the Euro Auris just had its’ and the iM reflects that.
But even as Corolla sedan and hatchback, there’s no reason for them not to have slightly different “faces”, especially when it took a car-guy like me several minutes of studying side-by-side parked cars to notice the difference.
Also, the lack of rebeliousness among the current youth scares me. Creative Destruction is necessary and conformists aren’t very good at it. (Lest you think I’m casting stones, I didn’t have that rebellious spirit as a younger man, and I wish I had.)
I think the whole rebelling against your parents or the generation above yours is trite and cliched. It’s perfectly possible to be rebellious without stomping upstairs exclaiming “you don’t understand me MOM”. That whole treating generations as these exclusive clubs(boomers, Xers, Millennials) with their sacred possessions, be it cars music or whatever, not to be embraced between is true creative destruction. Pretty much the reason popular music basically has been stale for 20 years.
Besides, there’s more than enough things to rebel against in modern society that are more substantial. I got along perfectly well with my parents as a teenager, but authority, educators, popular culture I was and still am quite rebellious against. Frankly on that note I argue kids don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them anymore because they don’t want to lose a chunk of their help with student loans, and then once they’re wringed through that higher education system for the remainder of their most rebellious point of youth they have nothing at all interesting to contribute to society creatively.
It sounds like someone has a rather flawed analysis of ‘youthful rebellion’ especially when trying to sell *new cars* since …maybe 2001 or so. Really, youthful car enthusiasm really flagged in the US, partly cause of student debt and …not being able to afford them. One reason coupes probably went out is cause the format of life changed where going in pairs with occasional back seat company in several cars was a lot less likely than trying to get a little crowd into a sedan or SUV with maybe a big stereo in and out of the pawnshops or something.
‘Youthful rebellion’ is usually kind of co-opting something that was cool to your parents or uncool to your parents at that age, or, whatever you can get your hands on. “Here, buy this hip branding just for you ‘cool kids,’ we get you, like Pat Boone… or something…’ That was fairly doomed.
They *almost* should have started right off with ‘This is cool in Japan, isn’t it funky, but it works.’ instead of looking kind of like a discount brand.
I mean, like with the FR-S, there’s a setup that kids were actually kind of trying to replicate cause, well, drift scene stuff was in, ….. and to a lot of that crowd, (Not to mention older folks like myself wondering why a darn rear drive Celica is so expensive now, a ‘Toyota 86’ or ‘Toyota Spunkyarse GT’) would probably sell better anyway, no matter how many Camrys bored you to death as a kid. 🙂
Anyway, perhaps the mistake there is too much emphasis on ‘Youth branding’ rather than, necessarily, ‘What people happen to want and why.’ (As a Gen Xer, we were notoriously hard to advertise to that way anyway, but the only reason you wouldn’t buy the same brand of car as your parents had was either a) Actually wanting something else for reasons, or b) Cause whatever your parents had sucked and fell apart and you didn’t think you’d get a good car. 🙂
I always figured that Scion was the way Toyota could sell something other than appliances in the same show room without offending the “Kenmore” crowd.
I still want the Supra to come back…..oh well.
+1 Hopefully this is the step in the right direction
Good riddance, to the Japanese version of Saturn.
Now, Toyota can get their heads outta the sand and concentrate on sportier, more inexpensive and fun-to-drive Toyotas, to add to their mediocre lineup.
Their model lineup was so full of appliances, since 2000… They might as well have changed their name to Maytag or Whirlpool.
Never understood WHY the car-Gods kept Scion around, but killed off Pontiac.
There was no room for Pontiac between Chevy and Buick in segments already dominated by Toyota, Nissan, and Honda.
The Scion’s were different models of Toyota than the Toyota-badged cars. Best example would be the Scion xB. Although it was a Toyota bB, the Toyota model was never sold here. And only existed as an option badge changing (my toaster has them, while it says Scion, at no place on the body does it say xB – they’re all bB badges).
In the final ten years, every time Chevrolet would come out with a car, Pontiac would have one within a few months. G3=Aveo, G5=Cruze, Sunbird=Cavalier. It was only when you were getting into the Malibu/G6/Grand Am classes and bigger that you were seeing differentiations in a platform, rather than virtual badge-engineering (a different front end on the exact same body).
“In the final ten years, every time Chevrolet would come out with a car, Pontiac would have one …”
More like since the 60’s
Ventura II = Nova, T1000 = Chevette, Astre= Vega, Sunbird = Monza, etc, etc etc.
Also, GM was belly up, beggars can’t be choosers, so bye bye Pontiac
Now Paul owns four orphaned vehicle models since neither the TSX, Xb, Ram Van (Chinook?), nor F-100 are produced anymore.
I sat in a Scion Ia at the Portland Auto Show and the lack of a center armrest was a serious omission plus the rear seat was a bit snug for someone like me who is a 5′ 11″ fence post.
Wow, this is really bringing out the haters. Scion has had a handful of popular or reasonably popular cars- the first xB, the xA, and the FR-S. When the first tC came out, there were very few exciting coupe options (way fewer than today). Even the xD was a pretty good car… I remember checking out a Corolla when they were new, and the xD was a great value. The only Scion that really deserves hate is the second xB, and its not even that crappy. The iM is pretty dull, and although the iA (which is great, seriously, check one out) is a rebadged Mazda 2, it’s still the only way to get a Mazda 2 in the US. So basically, I don’t get the hate for Scion… apart from some cheesy marketing. Yes, it had become irrelevant, and a better gen 2 xB would have been nice.
One aspect of Scion that I really liked was their “release series.” These had some pretty neat upgrades from other models, upgrades that would NEVER have happened on a Toyota. I particularly liked the neon green xB with TVs in the headrest, and the rootbeer-color changing xB as well. Scion also pushed a lot of TRD upgrades, including a factory supercharger. Pretty cool.
It never fails. Folks love to hate on them, because their batting average is higher than any one else’s. And because they’re seen as the reason the Big Three failed. Haters gonna hate….
“Haters gonna hate.”
I’m sorry, Paul… Were you in a Run DMC stance and wearing a backwards Starter cap when you said that?
Because all I can picture is Bud Bundy as Grandmaster B on Married with Children. Lol 😉
I was thinking more of Taylor Swift, personally. Even more incongruous?
See, this is the problem, I dislike Scion the pseudo brand, not the cars under it’s umbrella. In fact I quite like the FR/S and thanks to Paul I do actually find myself appreciating the Gen 1 XB. These to me should have been Toyota branded vehicles since inception. Toyota was propagator of the one brand car company, what the industry has been trending towards more and more, so starting a subbrand was foolish at worst and questionable at best. I don’t think it hurt Toyota the corporation(don’t worry stockholders, I’m not hating on your retirement gravy train)but I don’t think it helped Toyota the brand’s image whatsoever, if anything it was a sign of distancing the pedestrian beige Camrys from niche cars people want for more than their religious devotion to the text of consumer reports.
You may not be ripping on the vehicles, but many other people are.
I don’t think you’re understanding the thinking behind Scion. Many things were attempted under the Scion subbrand that never would have occurred under Toyota, and several cars were brought over that wouldn’t have been otherwise. Most of these were mildly revised products for foreign markets, which were sold at existing Toyota dealerships.
Could they have been labeled as Toyotas? Sure, why not. But they wouldn’t have been brought over as Toyotas. They’re not going to start selling an xA next to a Yaris hatchback, or a iM next to a Yaris sedan (we’ll see if some of these cars disappear following the integration of Scion under Toyota). Scions may have cannibalized a few low end Toyotas, but it’s all in the family income-wise. Plus, the cost of their expanded lineup was low. So cumulatively I’m sure Scion brought in extra sales that would have been absent otherwise. That strikes me as a savvy move.
Just to make a few concessions- Toyota probably could have sold the FRS and xB as Toyotas, and the Toyota brand may have benefited from that level of excitement. However, the xB was a big contributor to Scion’s initial success (and yes, Scion was successful initially), and you can’t blame them for trying to extend that success with the FRS.
I agree that Scion has always been goofy. The marketing has never appealed to me. I also agree that the subbrand has reached the end of its useful life. I’m not exactly a Scion lover. But the Scion bashing that’s going on in here is just silly; Scion as a whole wasn’t a failure or bad idea, and the cars certainly weren’t bad.
GN’s comment below mine offers a perspective I agree with.
Kudos to Paul and the commentariat for another informative and mostly civil discussion!
My opinion is that rolling out the Scion name was actually clever. The initial cars, especially xB and tC were refreshingly different (or in the case of the tC, rare in the market.) Had they been brought out as Toyotas, they probably wouldn’t have gotten nearly as much attention. Being Scion, they piqued public curiosity. Later, the fact that they were Toyota products was a good thing. Buyers in the market for Scion types of cars could buy with confidence.
I for one will miss Scion, a bright spot in a sea of bland. Not just Toyota, but all cars in general. Too bad the line was starved for both products and advertising. I can’t remember the last time I saw a Scion ad.
Great thought, and I agree with you on it was a refreshing way to get people in Toyota showrooms for a different flavor of Toyota. I agree with Paul as well – like Geo, Scion was just a label of a unique product labeled differently elsewhere. It cost little to create and little to dismantle.
My only grudge towards Scion is they made some nifty little cars (the xA, xD and tC come to mind), but if you wanted some basic amenities you were shit out of luck (power seat, sunroof in most cases).
I wonder if the Toyota badge will increase the resale….
“When the first tC came out, there were very few exciting coupe options (way fewer than today)”
tC is a sporty hatchback, not a coupe with trunk lid. Rare then. Rare now.
@ passing gas: agreed, I think most of the Scion line-up was pushing the envelope in some way. And I also liked release series. Scion/Toyota did a very nice job of giving you a cool color years before you knew it was cool. The 2006/7 RS4 in the torched penny color was a good example. That color brown was very rare at the time but is everywhere now (including on my new CRV).
A perfect example of the “Toyota Way” in action and why I respect their business practices. Basically:
1) they saw a gap in the market (younger buyers not wanting a Toyota)
2) they identified a lost cost way to offer differentiated product (good JDM designs)
3) they learned from the Saturn debacle and realized the risks of standalone dealers for a product that overlapped Toyota
4) they worked with dealers to set-up a low-cost way to merchandise the cars that included lots of high margin accessories–which also built the early Scion brand character as well
5) the plan worked and ran its course, so given how they set it up, it is easy to wind it down, just like eliminating a “series brand”
6) they keep learning, so they are expanding the Prius line without going quite so far as Scion
So it’s pretty simple: study, make smart bets, work with your dealers, don’t overstay your welcome and never throw good money after bad. Works in the car business just like any other…
Congrats Toyota, smart move. Paul, it’s cool to have an orphan 🙂
Too bad FCA does not follow the “Toyota Way” with FIAT USA.
FIAT dealerships (excuse me, “studios”) are closing all around me. The New Orleans & Baton Rouge “studios” have been shuttered. Nearest “studio” is Pensacola, FL or Shreveport, LA. Fiat sales are struggling in the USA. Blame cheap gas and poor marketing.
Maybe if FCA would call the FIAT 500 a “Chrysler” and not a “brand”, my local Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep dealer could work on the Fiat 500X.
@Chuck
I really didn’t get the Fiat studio thing, either. Too bad they didn’t put Fiats in existing dealerships. If they had, they would’ve been in a reputable dealer less than a mile from my house. The nearest studio is halfway across town (albeit run by another reputable dealer.)
The current vehicles for my wife and I were chosen strongly on the reputation of and proximity to the dealership.
@GN
+1 on pretty much all counts!
My only quibble is the Prius thing. Are they really going to stop calling them Toyotas? Naming the wider selection of Prius models a family is OK, but no need to stop calling them Toyotas. They have a good thing going there – why waste focus, effort or money calling them anything else?
Cutlass, anyone?
+1
I’m intrigued by all this hand-wringing over whether Scion was a “brand” or not. I suspect there are legal differences between how this works in the US vs the UK.
At the time, I was also very confused by news reports about the death of Pontiac and Saturn – I had no idea it could be so complex.
Regardless of what it says on the title, the Scions were so thinly veiled they may as well have put Corollas in the Scion showroom and just put a red line through the Toyota badge with a crayon. I find it hard to believe anyone fell for it, even if they were totally uninterested in cars.
When Daewoo morphed into Chevrolet in the UK, they said if you had bought one in the previous couple of years you could bring it into the dealer to have the badges changed for free. Somehow I doubt Toyota will do anything as cheesy as that. I think if I had one I’d be tempted to have Studebaker or Hupmobile badges made for it.
Ridiculous as it sounds GM NZ got permission from whoever hands such things out to relabel anything it imported as a Holden, hence shiploads of unsold old stock Vauxhall Vectras were imported from England and regrilled as a later model Holden Vectra easily done as Australia still had Camiras and no Vectras actually on their market, Toyota is merely rebadging its own cars Acura does the same with ordinary Hondas as Does Infiniti with Nissans, GM calls the Cruz a Holden out here its only a label and when OZ production stops it literally will only be a south pacific label for a Vauxhall/RHD Opel.
Scion’s “Pure Price” setup is a bad fit for the iM in particular; C-segment hatchbacks are becoming too mainstream to not have the sort of options everyone else in the segment offers or room for dealers to budge on pricing.
What would the Scion cars have done for Toyota’s image if they had been sold as Toyotas?
They all sell here either new or as used imports very well they are just Toyotas when all said and done, its pretty hard to pick out a bad Toyota other than those sold in OZ with Holden engines.
I’ve also grown tired of the comparison to the fiasco that was Saturn. That’s lazy journalism.
Wouldn’t this be more similar to Chevrolet’s Geo? IIRC it was a small section of the dealership devoted to the sub-brand, autos from partnered brands that could just as easily been badged Chevys, but which had some distinctions that made them more likely to appeal to a different buyer than Chevy. Eventually they just became Chevys. It was a non-story, even less so than Scion since it was such a brief run.
Incidentally, I’ll provide an anecdote for Scion’s failure. I am married to what should be Scion’s ideal shopper- a 25 year old, tech-savvy, video game loving, Japanese car driving, Asian male with enough disposable income. He drives a current gen Prius, aspires to Lexuses, He loves the current looks and quality of Toyotas and Lexuses, not perceiving them as old fogey cars at all. His friends and family drive every kind of Toyota product- Camrys, IS’s, Highlanders, LS’s, Priuses, but not a Scion in the bunch. He won’t look at any of Scion’s offerings because of his negative Scion perceptions and because they don’t have a CUV, the likely Prius replacement.
I do believe Toyota when they said they felt they needed Scion for those first years to bring new buyers into Toyota, and it certainly has resulted in more variety of cars than had it not existed. But it apparently Scion has little value now to Toyota, as that demo goes right for the Toyotas and Lexuses. And I agree with Paul that Scion has done nothing to damage the parent brand. Scion’s demise only provides fodder for the typical trolls of the internets. Nobody else will care in the long run. Certainly not Toyota.
With your comment about “his friends and family drive every kind of Toyota product” I’m reminded of their current marketing scheme which is basically “ask a friend who owns one”.
Echoes of Packard’s “Ask the man who owns one” from the 40’s, but it’s remarkably effective, especially given how many devoted Toyota owners there are out there. And it basically flies in the face of Scion’s “hey look guys we’re so DIFFERENT” model.
Golly, there sure is a lot of displaced vitriol and bias ’round these parts. Time for me to back away from the computer, have a drink, and watch something less biased–like the presidential election.
From 1989-97, Chevrolet’s captive imports were sold under the Geo brand. The Metro taking the place of the Sprint along with the Prizm replacing the Toyota based Nova. By 1998 the Tracker, Prizm and Metro were badged as Chevys once again.
Scion tC and the VW Beetle are the only “sporty” 2-door, 4-seat liftback/hatchback on the US market. (Golf 2-door is a boxy “sedan” with a nearly identical 4-door version)
It will be down to the VW Beetle in 2017 as the sole remnant of a once popular body style (Toyota Celica, Nissan 200/240SX, Mustang II, Fox Mustang, Ford/Mercury Capri, Chevy Monza … the last Mercury Cougar)
ive got a kirkland signature fridge, made by whirlpool. i also have a scion xa, but already badged it JDM style, as a toyota Ist. both are awesome appliances, and i know who made them.
i think my registration says TOYT 5dr, and my VIN starts JTKKT, so japanese toyota, right?
all “scions” are world market toyotas filling in niches in toyotas lineup. hopefully theyll go back to the world names- like FT86 for the BR-Z, and Auris for the iM
Whenever i saw a Scion xB I thought of a toaster on steroids.
+1
Agreed the original xBs were a little hard to look at. Just about all of the ones I’ve seen on a regular basis have the too-small / plain standard wheels. Ones with modestly up-sized wheels like the silver one in this article look way better.
I think we all need a little syrup of squills… or maybe a flagon of whiskey…
So, I don’t quite understand. Was Scion actually a brand?
Duck & cover 🙂
Have a nice day folks!
Quote from you-know-which-source:
…”In the English lexicon, the Germanic word “brand” originally meant anything hot or burning”….
Ain’t that right ! 🙂
(Your ancestors used exactly the same word for anything that was on fire)
Toyota has an image problem..theyve had it for some time. When I was wrapping up my B.A.in Journalism back in 1998, our project was doing an ad campaign for the Echo. What a joke. I was in the research leg of it, since I was the ONLY one of my class of 30 people with actual automotive knowledge. From the focus groups and interviews I did, it pretty much backed up my own feelings on Toyotas which was that people in my age range (I was 24 at the time) wouldn’t touch one. And I had a bit more favorable view of them at the time, since my own image was based on the old school Land Cruisers, solid axle pickups, Supras, Celicas…the ‘good stuff’. Most of that was LONG gone by this point, since it seemed Toyota only wanted to build bottom feeder corollas, mom’s camry, and a laughable attempt at competing with ‘real trucks’ in the fullsize arena. Only the Tacomas were really respected among Gen Xers since the Celica while still a decent performer was seen as a shell of the ones from the early-mid 80s. Toyotas whole marketing campaign now is a MAJOR turn off as far as Im concerned. If you could distill it down to a personality type for the company, it would resemble that bowtie guy on the H&R Block ads. NOT the flag I want to fly out on the road.
Most Scions were pretty decent cars and seemed interesting. I liked the xB (1st gen much more), the tC looks nice even if it needs more power. The FR-S seems to be the star of the show right now. But Toyota could have always offered some cool cars in the mix of beigemobiles, they just chose not to and for far too long. Anything even smacking of the Supra has been sold as a Lexus, and the FR-S is what the Celica should have been back in ’99. When I saw that Scion is now offering a sedan (warmed over corolla, Im assuming)….well that pretty much told me that ‘youth division’ was pretty much over.
I think the warmed over sedan you mention is a badge engineered Mazda 2 isn’t it? Really struggled to see the point in that, and it’s so clearly Mazda based it’s ridiculous.
“Toyota has an image problem…”
With “car guys” wanting new Supras [to dream about], maybe. But with paying customers, they are making $$ hand over fist.
I am pretty sure they won’t be begging for bailouts any time soon.
I don’t agree that Toyota has an image problem with car guys as far as product, I do(did now) however see separation of “car guy” models from the Toyota brand as a move that can be perceived as calculated segregation. It’s very un PC and unfashionable to be a car guy in the new millennium.
But ultimately they do make up a portion of the market no matter how reviled and dismissed they are, and can serve as better advertisers for product among their peers than whatever a marketing department can come up with. People swapping Toyota badges onto Scions is case and point, car guys DO like Toyotas, but the company wasn’t treating those cars the same as the bread and butter CR darlings in the showroom. The Camry and Corolla are endlessly touted and praised for their long running nameplates, but the Celica, MR2 and Supra? At least two of them arguably have modern day equivalents, but they’re shoved off into other brands, why? Where’s the heritage? Car guys and gals are a nostalgic bunch, way more so than the Camry/Corolla drivers out there. It’s easy to critique the Fords and GMs for having a bazillion different names gracing their various C/D/E segment models, but damned if they haven’t stuck with their enthusiast nameplates for 50+ years.
“Car guys and gals are a nostalgic bunch, way more so than the Camry/Corolla drivers out there.”
I’m not so sure about that. If i’m not mistaken, the only brand with higher repeat purchase loyalty than Toyota in the industry is Ford. I think the nostalgia is there, but for different (practical) reasons.
The Camry/Corrola names stick around because they’re the easy go to choice for people since they never have a terrible previous generation, I don’t know if I’d call that nostalgia, that’s just good reputation. For something truly nostalgic there has to be a certain rose tinted glasses romanticizing. I mean Ford, Dodge and GM made some truly terrible Camaros, Challengers, Mustangs and Corvettes over the years, but they’ve remained storied and revered enthusiast nameplates nonetheless, across generations of fans, even when the bad ones are fresh(even contemporary) on everyone’s mind, so those names stuck around based seemingly on nostalgia alone.
As a former owner of an XB1, I am said to hear this news. I believe Toyota started with a good concept, bring over interesting and different Japanese market cars and call them Scions. However, after the original XA and XB, they stopped doing this and Scion slowly died. There is a large number of Japanese market cars we don’t see in US. Scion would have been a way to sell these at minimum risk to main brand. If something was a hit keep it, if not quietly drop it and bring the next model forward. Models could have had a short life to keep up interest and news. The major cost would have been getting them approved in US market.
When originally introduced the official stance was that all Scions were to be “one and done” and that they wouldn’t do a gen 2 of any of their vehicles. That quickly went away when the xB was their biggest seller and they couldn’t let go of that model name. So there was a gen 2 xB and it was a flop compared to the original.
I’m honestly surprised it’s taken Toyota this long to give up on Scion. Its irrelevance has been pretty obvious for quite a while.
I seem to say this at least every two weeks or so, but I think the inescapable problem with automotive “youth brands” in the current market is that they just don’t make any economic sense. The target audience has been victimized by the economy for going on a decade at this point to a degree that makes trying to assess their automotive tastes a moot point. Limited job opportunities, low wages, skyrocketing housing costs, and staggering student loan debt don’t leave consumers with a lot of car-buying options, and youth-oriented marketing campaigns don’t change that fact.
This. The young people I know who drive new cars over the past 5 years or so come in two groups- the ones who bought the car on their own, but still live with their parents, or the ones who got the car as a gift.
Youth may be the target audience but I sure see a lot of guys my age (geezer) driving them. As I think of it entry and exit car buyers may have a lot of needs in common. Anyway…I agree that youth market for cars may not make any sense economic or otherwise.
That’s been the dilemma of Scion and other efforts like it — the Honda Element is another good example. It was supposed to be a hip Youth Market vehicle for young people with active lifestyles, but it seems to have had strongest appeal to empty-nesters who like having some way to haul bulky household stuff around without paying too big a price in fuel economy or parking ease. Likewise, Scions like the xB and the older xA and xD also appealed to older folks who just want a reliable, fuel-efficient small car that doesn’t cost too much, although that audience was exactly the kind Toyota was hoping to shed.
The other problem with the “youth market” idea is that automakers have too specific an idea of what will appeal to “the kids today” and it fails. Speaking as a Millennial, if you were to do a list of general stereotypes or assumptions about my generation, I would probably break some or most of them if not ignore them entirely. Let’s say if a carmaker were to focus group test a bunch of kids who somehow want a new car and are able to afford one, if you were to present an idea or a consensus was reached about what you were planning to make, I would probably disagree or voice my opinion about why I would never be interested in it. Now, that’s just me, that’s one person’s opinion and in the end, I can’t afford to buy new, so it doesn’t matter much. But, to build a car based on a generalized idea of what “the kids today” would buy is just shortsighted, because not every kid is like that. In a decade where the trends and tastes of a generation like mine change every week at the quickest, to try and cash in on that is just shortsighted in the long term. I do agree that there are economic factors to consider (the student loan thing in particular is one of the reasons why I’ve elected not to go to college at the present), but if you want to appeal to the youth market, you can’t form this general idea and expect it to work for everyone, you have to be more flexible than that.
To give this more weight, if I were to buy a new car under 50k that I could maybe obtain if I had a job or saved as much as I could, you know what I would buy? A decently loaded Chevy Impala. That’s pretty far from the kind of car that Toyota envisioned Scion’s customer base buying, but then again, not every kid my age is interested in driving a car like the Xbox or the FR-S.
I may be older than their target audience now, but at the time Scion was launched, I was right in their wheelhouse (age 23 in 2003). And you’re right about not being able to capture everone’s tastes. Just look at my COAL article from last week; for what I paid for my 3 year old Marauder in 2006, I probably could have bought any new vehicle in the Scion showroom. Yet I didn’t even consider them. Just wasn’t on my radar at the time.
Also the comment about younger folks not really being able to afford new vehicles, because of the economy and student loan debt, is right on the money. My wife and I are friends with a lot of folks in their late 20’s that were her grad school classmates, and almost none of them drive new cars. Most are either still driving something passed down from their parents, or inexpensive used Toyotas or Hondas. Heck, my wife is 34 and has never purchased a new car. She drove the car her parents bought her (used) in her senior year of college for almost 10 years, and is currently driving a vehicle I bought when she went back to school. Now that she’s in the workforce, maybe the next one is on her. 🙂
Since the 1920’s, most young adults couldn’t afford brand new cars. Imagine during the Great Depression it was even more out of reach.
Any make should emphasize CPO cars at dealers to boost credit ratings for one thing
so then is the xB going to be renamed Camry Wagon? 🙂
It’s already been discontinued. The 2015 model website is still up but I assume that’s because there are still unsold ’15s at dealers.
The xB seemed like what you get when 60 year old Toyota Execs decide what “Today’s American Youth” want. Couldn’t have gotten it more wrong judging from the average age of the folks I see driving them.
So thanks but no thanks Scion. If I ever start an Ice Cream truck business in an Eastern Bloc country, I’ll call you.
Regardless of the veracity of your facts on whether Scion was legally a brand, Paul, your stooping to unprovoked ad hominem attacks is really unbecoming. 🙁 I will admit that I haven’t read every word of every comment on this post, but it looked to me like those disagreeing with you might not have had all their facts straight, but none of them actually insulted you.
Until reading this post I had no idea that Scions were actually titled as Toyotas — at least as far as the NHTSA and the State of Florida are concerned. The whole idea was dumb from the start, but at least they had the sense to structure it so that it would be cheap and easy to dismantle (pull down the partitions and remove the signs as Paul noted). BTW, I think “brand” is the wrong word to use when discussing legalities. A better word to differentiate Scion from, say, Oldsmobile or Saturn is “make.” Yes, Scion is a brand (like Crest or Tide) but it is not a “make” according to American governments.
Toyota was targeted at young people, however, most of the ugly boxes were driven by old people because they were cheap, so seeing that, the kids wouldn’t be caught dead in them.
Scion-a car whose time has come-and gone. Guess the generations that were supposed to buy them-Gen X ers and millennials just aren`t into cars. No great loss really, now Jan the Toyota woman can push Corollas and Camrys to this demographic.
INMHO, I really felt that the Scion brand was in the beginning much like when Chevrolet had the Geo subdivision from the late 1980s though the late 1990s. Geo was practically a Chevrolet while Scion was practically a Toyota period. This is the closest analogy that it gets. BTW did you know that the Geo later Chevrolet Prizm was actually a badge equipped Toyota Corolla. In addition the Pontiac Vibe (its replacement) was actually a variation of the Toyota Matrix?
The reason for the Geo brand was, by the 1990’s, there was a large generation of car buyers who wouldn’t be caught dead driving a Chevrolet, any ‘traditional’ GM model, and, for that matter, any American branded car. The Geo nameplate was for those people who would be willing to walk into a Chevrolet dealership and buy a not-Chevrolet (at least until you looked at the title, and no, the salesman wasn’t about to volunteer that what you were taking delivery on was a Chevrolet in the eyes of the state).
To a certain extent it worked: Back when they were calling the Geo Prizm a Chevrolet Nova, Consumer’s Reports was going crazy because their faithful were paying hundreds (sometimes thousands) over sticker to buy a Toyota Corolla but wouldn’t consider a Chevrolet Nova which was the exact same car, built on the exact same assembly line, at the exact same time. And there was cash on the hood of the Nova!
Update the design and change the name to Geo Prizm, and the car sold respectably well. And, as a few of my friend were of the “Chevrolet bad, Toyota good” attitude, I noticed all of them were willing to buy a Geo Prizm because the dealer would actually deal. All you had to do was change the name on the hood.
…there was a large generation of car buyers who wouldn’t be caught dead driving a Chevrolet, any ‘traditional’ GM model, and, for that matter, any American branded car.
As I recall, that was Roger Smith’s thinking behind Saturn: appeal to the people who buy Japanese cars and would not go near a Chevy. While Geos were sold at Chevy dealers, they went all in with Saturn: it’s own plant, unique models, rather than a rebadged Chevy, or Toyota/Isuzu/Suzuki, unique construction, the plastic body panels, and unique features, like the third door on the coupe, sell through stand alone dealers, for those who wouldn’t even walk into a Chevy store to buy a Toyota, and a unique business model “you want to buy into our trendy, new age image, so pay sticker”
Being a beancounter, Smith was probably thinking that, with Geo they had to share the profits with the OEM, while Saturn profits would be entirely GM’s, but in GM fashion they overspent on creating the image. At least he recognized how badly GM had poisoned it’s own brand.
You keep saying that there was little to no cost to Toyota and the dealers that chose to take on the brand. You also keep saying that there were not complex legal agreements.
Yes the cost of making and killing Scion was less than say Saturn but there were still costs. Scion advertising was advertising for Scion they did not mention them in Toyota advertisements and they didn’t mention Toyota in Scion ads either.
The sign fairy didn’t go around installing signs at dealerships because they noticed vehicles with Scion Badges on them. The advertising fairy didn’t create the marketing materials. There were significant costs associated with creating Scion, no not on par with Saturn but in the same ball park as Geo.
You can bet there were complex legal agreements that dealers had to sign to be able to carry the product and display the signs. You can be certain there were brand standards in those agreements that detailed what a dealer had to do as far as signage ect. If that complex legal agreement didn’t specifically state that dealers had zero recourse if Toyota discontinued offering cars with the Scion Badge you can be certain that lawsuits will follow based on that complex legal agreement that dealers and a Scion representative signed.
The fact is that the brand died because it didn’t make financial sense to continue it. That means that there were costs associated with keeping it around that Toyota is looking to eliminate. If the product was compelling enough to sell in high enough volume they could have justified keeping it around. But it hasn’t meet expectations because Toyota missed the mark with the cars and the marketing. Another thing that points to the fact that Scion wasn’t cutting it financially for Toyota is that they started joint venturing/badge engineering part of their lineup. You do that to cut costs and you cut costs like that in an attempt to either cut losses or bring up the profit to acceptable levels.
Yes I called Scion a Brand because that is what the public perceived them as. The average buyer didn’t go around saying that they own a Toyota Scion mumble of letters, they said they say they own a Scion mumble of letters. They tell their friends how much they love, hate or are indifferent about their Scion. Toyota also calls Scion a brand on the Scion website. Go look for yourself https://www.scion.com/about “Scion set out to do the right thing and stand apart from other brands by giving drivers…” Sure sounds like Toyota wanted the public to consider Scion a brand unto itself. When you get to the bottom of the page you’ll find this “© 2015 Scion, a marque of Toyota Motor Sales USA, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Scion is a registered trademark of Toyota Motor Corporation.” Go look up the definition of marque and you’ll find things like this.
1. (Marketing) a brand of product, esp of a car
2. (Automotive Engineering) a brand of product, esp of a car
3. (Marketing) an emblem or nameplate used to identify a product, esp a car
4. (Automotive Engineering) an emblem or nameplate used to identify a product, esp a car
You’ll also find that when you look for a dealer on the Scion dedicated website the results say Scion of (insert city here), Joe’s Scion or (insert city here) Scion. None of them in my area list them as Toyota-Scion dealers, even though they of course all carry Toyota too.
So while Scion may not have legally been a “brand”, Toyota certainly wanted the public to consider it a brand and the general public does consider it a brand.
Actually I should have said that Scion might have not legally been a make, as witnessed on the registration/title, it certainly was a brand unto itself and that is what Toyota treated it as and wanted the public to consider it as.
Just to add some gasoline to the “was Scion a brand or not” debate. I decided to look at some VIN codes to see what the Gods of VIN call them.
I pulled up VINs for a tC, xD and xB, which all read “JT” aka Japan Toyota.
Then I pulled up a VIN for an FR-S: “JF”, aka Japan, Fuji Heavy Industries, aka Subaru.
Pulled up an iA: “3M”, Mexico, Mazda
Inquiring people want to know, does a state title or registration for an FR-S call it a Subie?
For jollies, I pulled up a Maybach VIN as they were sold in a special area in Mercedes dealerships, but advertised as a separate brand
Mercedes puts Maybach out of its misery
FORTUNE — Ending almost a decade of losses, Daimler is shutting down its super-luxury Maybach brand.
http://archive.fortune.com/2011/11/28/autos/maybach_mercedes_shut_down.fortune/index.htm
And the Maybach VIN reads “WD”: Germany, Mercedes.
Saturn Astra: WO: Germany, Opel
Either way, Scion, whether a brand or a marketing ploy, has joined the other redundant brands in heading to oblivion. I wonder when VW is going to figure out that Skoda and SEAT are redundant, but they will be harder to kill as they are separate organizations, even though the products are all retrimmed VWs.
Have a look at the European C-segment chart I posted above. A long list of offerings, and commercially a very important segment in Europe.
1. Volkswagen Golf – The King, The Master, The Emperor. Then, now, and in the future.
3. Skoda Octavia.
4. Audi A3.
7. Seat Leon.
That’s 4 VAG models in the top ten. There are no signs that VAG will drop Skoda and/or Seat.
That’s 4 VAG models in the top ten. There are no signs that VAG will drop Skoda and/or Seat.
Somehow, I managed to find a page on the global VAG site a while back that had a profit breakdown by division and SEAT was running a loss.
Even if Skoda and SEAT were both profitable, they still impose a cost on VAG as they have the overhead of extra sales organizations and extra styling and engineering groups, all working off the same platforms. Buying a Golf, Octavia or Leon is like choosing between a Chevy Cobalt, Pontiac G5 or Saturn Ion. GM finally saw the redundancies and used the opportunity of bankruptcy to close the redundant operations.
Back when VAG was topping Toyota’s global volume numbers, there were plenty of people pointing out that, while VAG had a lot of volume, they weren’t making much money at it. iirc, VAG had a profit margin of something like 5%, vs Toyota’s 10%, and most of VAG’s profits are from Audi. Margins at the VW division are very small.
This article in Forbes throws out some numbers Audi 9.7% operating profit, Porcshe 15.7% (highest in the industry), VW 2.6%. VW accounts for 53% of revenue, but only 22% of profit, while Audi accounts for 24% of revenue and 40% of profit.
I don’t know how VAG allocates costs, whether the VW division absorbs all platform and powertrain development costs, with Skoda and SEAT getting the engineering for free, then adding their own body and trim, but that’s a possibility as the same charts show Skoda accounting for 5% of revenue but 6% of profits. If Skoda was not subsidized somehow, it would not seem likely for it’s profits to be so much greater than the VW division while competing in the same market segment with essentially the same car. (the charts do not include SEAT, maybe because SEAT does not make any profit)
Ford and GM have one mass market C segment offering each in all of Europe and the UK. Why does VAG think it needs three?
Anyway, here is the article.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2015/08/03/volkswagen-earnings-review-revenues-and-profits-are-up-but-core-performance-remains-weak/#5b540c5c7a4a
“Somehow, I managed to find a page on the global VAG site a while back that had a profit breakdown by division and SEAT was running a loss.”
I worry about the future of SEAT thanks to the “dieselgate” scandal for this very reason.
Press release, Skoda financials, first half of 2015. Operating profit 8.1%. I only see two ways to account for the difference in profit between Skoda and VW: Skoda is being subsidized, or VW management is incompetent. If it were all due to lower wages at the Skoda plants, drop the Skoda name, stick VW badges on what comes out the door and let the VW dealers enjoy the better margins.
http://www.volkswagenag.com/content/vwcorp/info_center/en/news/2015/07/Skoda_HY.html
VAG profit breakdown by division. SEAT lost 150M Euros in each of 2012 and 13.
http://europe.autonews.com/article/20140707/ANE/140709902/the-key-players:-a-brand-by-brand-breakdown-of-vw-groups-most
FWIW, Seat’s “Strategy 2025”:
http://seat-mediacenter.com/en-stories/corporate/seat-sketches-forward-looking-roadmap/?v=t&p=1&overview=0&overview=1
FWIW, Seat’s “Strategy 2025”:
When I was in grad school in 81, all the business courses were talking about how important it is to have a corporate mission statement. Everyone decreed they were going to provide “high quality products that were in tune with customer’s wants with competitive prices” It’s a lot of hoey. That SEAT press release sounds the same.
So SEAT management says they are going to do all these wonderful things to stop the bleeding? (the 2014 VAG annual report says SEAT lost another 126M, the 2015 report is probably due out in a week) If those things were doable, why haven’t they already done them, instead of losing 100M+ Euros year after year after year?
If I was running VAG, I might, might consider cutting the VW line off at the Golf, drop the Polo and Up. Then make Skoda the cheap line with the top of the line model equal to an Astra H: C class but with a beam axle and cheaper interior materials selling at a significant discount to a Golf, something along the lines of the largely Mexican designed Mk6 Jetta as it was initially sold here in 2011. (the Astra we got here is noticeably cheaper inside than my Mk5 Jetta wagon), then with replacements for the Polo and Up positioned below the C class entry.
But the Polo is well established as a VW, so i am more inclined to just axe Skoda and SEAT.
Whenever a brand is discontinued, the comments come from all over the spectrum. And still get “I miss Brand XXX, why oh why…”.
Lot of emotions in what car make some like/dislike!
Good riddance. The only memorable products were the original xB and the FR-S. Everything else was forgettable from the start, and soldiered on way too long without any changes (a bit much like a certain dead GM brand’s products). The iA should just become the Yaris as it already is in Canada, and the iM should be called “Corolla Touring” or something to that extent. Of course, the FR-S can just become a Toyota “86” like it is everywhere else in the world. The only tC commercials I’ve ever seen looked like they were made by a 15-year-old who just got a MacBook for his birthday, and that may as well have been the target market.
Years ago, I looked at a Scion.
I walked away thinking “cheap”.
I ended up deciding on a Vibe.
I’ve never been able to shake the cheap stigma of a Scion.
Looking at the original Matrix and the Vibe together, the Vibe being so much a Toyota, still had a soul.
I have to have a car with a soul. Perhaps it isn’t the best car out there, as my 2013 Dart can attest, but much like the 2008 Astra before it, it came with personality.
I will not mourn Scion… But maybe Toyota can now shift some passion into their showrooms onto their core offerings, and maybe when I’m back in the market, I’ll shop there again.
Carry on.
Is this over yet? Can us Europeans who do not understand the US Toyota phenomenon come out now?
As long as you don’t call your Merkur Scorpio a Mercury…or a Ford in the USA!!
So last week Toyota killed Scion.
This week, Toyota buys total control of Daihatsu, maker of funky looking JDM minicars. The plan for Daihatsu? Turn it into a Mini knockoff aimed at Millennial Americans and Generation Z shoppers
Let’s call this “Scion, part II, starting over, with a name that is harder to spell”