From the WTF Dept: A Scion Truck?

Frank Williams
by Frank Williams

You read it right. Bloomberg reports Scion's brand manager, Jack Hollis, revealed in an interview yesterday that they're looking at expanding their lineup of rebadged Toyotas trendy economy cars. Showing Toyota is beginning to read from the GM brand management manual, he asked, "Should it be a youth truck, a youth SUV, an environmental car, a smaller car? We're studying right now to see which would be the greatest priority." He explained their rationale: "There are more leading-edge people we can attract that may not be attracted yet to these first three products." In spite of Scion's dropping sales (down 25 percent last year, 6.7 percent last month), he also said they would keep targeting "trend-setting" customers instead of just going for higher sales volume.

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  • Dave M. Dave M. on Mar 20, 2008
    If Toyota wants to build a budget priced truck, it should be badged as a Toyota, not a Scion. But Scion has obviously become their strip/value brand, Toyota medium, Lexus luxury/sport(?). I think it's a great idea as long as there is some sort of utility to it - jobbers/commercial have a huge need for small pick-ups. The current menu is sorely lacking.
  • Marc Marc on Mar 20, 2008

    The day Scion's execs look to traditional auto blogging sites, TTAC, Autoblog, Autospies, et al for input is the day the brand does fold. What I love is the hypocrisy. No too many years ago the same bloggers who today pine for the OG Scions were railing against the xB and xA on these sites. Now they predict the Scion sky is falling, and hate on any new concept or even just random musings from execs. Just FYI, xB sales have been up double digits for the past 3-4 months, xD sales have now matched former xA sales, leaving only the aging tC with slowing sales.

  • Johnson Johnson on Mar 20, 2008

    The interesting thing is that most auto sites are not run by 18 - 30 year olds that Scion is interested in attracting to the brand. Therefore, it would make sense that most auto sites will criticize Scion as the Scion brand isn't really designed to cater to them. The REAL measure of whether Scion is "successful" or not would be a study or measure at various social networking sites to see what the opinion of Scion is among youths. And yes, it is correct that Scion sales are up, with the exception of the tC.

  • Frank Williams Frank Williams on Mar 20, 2008
    Marc: Just FYI, xB sales have been up double digits for the past 3-4 months, True. In Jan, xB was up 17.2% over 2007, and in Feb it was up 33.3%. But looking at the raw numbers, they only sold 486 more xB's in Jan 08 than they did in Jan 07, and 956 more in Feb 08 than in Feb 07.
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