Blame Toyota’s sheer lack of interest for demise of Scion brand
The news of Toyota putting to rest its long-suffering Scion brand should have come as no surprise. With minimal new product investment for more than a decade and a movement away from the Scion brand’s original values, the demise of its so-called youth brand can be best described as a death by a thousand cuts.
Even more worrisome for Toyota fans is how similar the Japanese automaker’s bungling of Scion mirrors General Motors’ spoiling of its defunct Saturn marque. GM created Saturn in the mid-1980s to lure buyers from Japanese imports. Sold as “a different kind of car company,” Saturn had some initial sales success with a unique, no-hassle sales process and fuelefficient small cars with dent-resistant body panels.
However, Saturn’s troubles began a decade later when a financially struggling GM stopped investing in brand-exclusive products. Not so “different” anymore, GM pulled the plug on Saturn, along with Pontiac, Saab and Hummer, as part of its bankruptcy recovery plans in 2009.
Similar to Saturn, Scion was created to be different. The Toyota brand was first launched as a collection of small vehicles for 2003 to attract young, urban American buyers who would never consider buying a Toyota like their parents drove. Scion sales peaked at 175,000 units in 2006.
But then, just as GM cynically took advantage of the goodwill created by its original Saturn concept, Toyota seriously misjudged the loyalty of Scion customers. In quick order, the first Scion xB and xA models were replaced with larger, heavier and less-distinctive looking versions. And guess what? Customers who created Scion’s initial success weren’t all that impressed.
Not unexpectedly, Scion’s U.S. annual sales plummeted, to just 58,000 by 2009. And (again, like GM), parent Toyota stopped investing in new Scion products. With the exception of the secondgeneration 2011 tC Coupe, Scion relied on special editions during a time when small cars from Nissan, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mazda, Ford and others started to eat Scion’s breakfast, lunch and dinner.
At this point, you would have thought Toyota had suffered enough and would pack it in. But instead, it pushed ahead with plans to expand the lame-duck brand into Canada, with highly optimistic sales expectations projecting more than 30,000 annually by 2013.
Those initial projections were ratcheted down to 12,000 to 13,000 units annually. Bolstered by the introduction of the new 2016 Scion iM compact hatchback, only 4,659 Scions were sold in Canada in 2015 — a fraction of what nameplates such as the Honda Fit (9,088), Kia Soul (13,335) and Hyundai Accent (19,371) sold last year.
So why did Scion fail? The tale seems to be similar to why GM’s Saturn died: a sheer lack of interest in what was not a core part of the parent’s business. That Scion lived on for 10 years after its sales started to sag in 2006 says more about the deep coffers of Toyota.
During the past decade of malaise for Scion, the Japanese automaker had plenty of opportunities to make the brand relevant again. Scion designers never seemed to lack new ideas. For years, Scion would tease us with a concept at each New York Auto Show, but like the 2008 Hako Coupe, they would never see production.
The stillborn 2017 Scion C-HR small crossover, Toyota’s six-years-too-late response to the Nissan Juke, tells you everything you need to know about Scion’s lazy product investment.
In the end, Scion could have been much more. Like BMW’s “i” brand, Toyota could have employed Scion to sell Toyota’s alternative-fuel vehicles, like its plug-in electric or hydrogen fuel-cell cars.
Of course, lost in the Scion news was Toyota’s purchase of Daihatsu. Reportedly, Toyota aims to make the small carmaker a competitor to BMW’s Mini brand on a global scale, a mission the automaker never felt confident or bold enough to take on with its now-dead Scion.