The brand’s vehicles will be re-badged as Toyota models beginning with the 2017 model-year.
“Clearly we don’t take the discontinuation of a brand lightly — something that we’ve invested enormous amount of personal resources in for 13 years,” Bob Carter, senior vice president of automotive operations for Toyota Motor Sales, told reporters in a conference call.
Toyota envisioned Scion as an entry point for cost-conscious, young buyers. In that respect, the strategy worked. The average age of a Scion buyer was 36 years old, and 70% of the brand’s buyer’s had never purchased a Toyota before.
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. Carter acknowledged that the company failed to reach Millennial buyers through marketing.
The last straw, you could say, was plunging gasoline prices, which have crushed sales of the type of small cars Scion sells.
“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.”
The company joins other auto brands that have recently gone defunct, such as Chrysler’s Plymouth, Ford’s Mercury and GM’s Hummer, Saturn, Saab, Pontiac and Oldsmobile.
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.