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Update 2: Toyota has officially announced Scion’s “transition to Toyota.”
Update 1: Road&Track is reporting it has confirmed the rumor with an inside source and the death of Scion will be publicly announced later today.
A top-secret meeting took place Tuesday afternoon to announce the death of the Scion brand to employees, reports CarBuzzard (via Motor Trend). The company is rumored to make the announcement public today.
We at TTAC have openly wondered about the future of Scion, though recent sales performance of new products looked to have put the youth-oriented brand on the right track.
Established in 2002, Scion was Toyota’s plan to bring younger buyers into showrooms. Its initial products, especially the boxy xB, broke the mold and offered a very different alternative to the products available from the Toyota brand.
Most recently, Scion’s sales were on a steady slide until halfway through 2015. Two new products — the Toyota Europe-sourced iM and Mazda-sourced iA — looked as if they could turn the brand around.
At the 2015 Los Angeles Auto Show, Scion showed its version of the C-HR concept, a crossover that would give the brand much more legitimacy in a crossover-crazy market. A production version of that vehicle was expected to debut at the New York International Auto Show.
We will keep you up to date as we learn more through the day.
Won’t they just take the new cars and re-badge them ala Plymouth/Chrysler Prowler?
I would guess they would. They’re all Toyotas anyway.
Toyota GT86 anyone? :)
Would be easy, since Toyota is smart in that all of it’s logos (Scion, Toyota, Lexus) are identical. Just swap badging and it’s done!
No new grills, taillights, etc like other automakers..
Hopefully, most employees can move over to the mother ship. It might be fun to think of whether or what they’ll rename the Scion models. Will the Celica brand be resurrected?
If they rename the tC to Celica, people are going to be piiiiiissed.
tC is not worthy! At all.
Corolla Sprinter! That’s more or less what it is already.
AFAICT the only “Scion specific” employees would be the marketing and sales people; since Scions are Toyotas everywhere else in the world its not like there’ll be much in the way of operations to cut.
the interesting question is what happens to the dealers.
They remove the signage and use the extra little building as office or storage, or make it a secondary showroom – perhaps for the truck models.
I like my second idea.
Until recently (in Gallup, NM) the building that had been the AMC dealership’s body shop still had its original signage. Even though it had been operating as an independent shop for decades.
And that tells you there was no legal team or personnel left to care about AMC.
a quick search at uspto.gov shows that any of the AMC/American Motors trademarks are considered “dead.” I think FCA is still maintaining the trademarks for specific nameplates, though (e.g. “Hornet.”)
Where are you located? In New England all of the Toyota/Scion dealerships I’m familiar with share a showroom. I haven’t ever seen one with a dedicated area, never mind a separate building.
I’m in Ohio. The one I was thinking of in particular is in northern KY, Kerry Toyota-Scion. Has two separate buildings, and Scion is with the trucks.
The other dealers in Cincinnati have dedicated separate areas for Scion, and signage outside above said area.
The local Scion store is already the used-car annex, for all practical purposes.
Ha, the dealer I referenced above has a -third- building for used cars only.
What is Scion’s youthiest, sportiest car that doesn’t sell? Rename that one the Akio.
There’s nothing Scion-y about the current lineup anyway, so they might as well rebadge them as Toyotas and call it a day.
Probably the right move…. poor Scion owners are going to take it in the culo on resale though. Even more than they already are.
Maybe it’s time for an FR-S project car…
I don’t know why you’d say that; it’s not like parts/service support will dry up anytime soon.
They should provide free Toyota emblems to FR-S owners to turn theirs into instant GT86’s the way they should have been in the first place.
anyone who cares about that has already done so. I’ve personally seen more than one FR-S with Toyota badges swapped.
Not around here!
So does this mean that the excellent and under the radar, iA will now become the new Yaris? Ir will send the competition back to the drawing boards or computers or whatever they use nowadays
why would simply changing the badge do anything? AFAIK most of the dealers are combined Toyota/Scion so it’s not like nobody knows about the iA.
they would sell a lot more of them badged as Yaris than the Scion one
assumes facts not in evidence.
I wouldn’t think so – the Yaris sells better than the iA. Plus, I don’t think Toyota would be interested in selling a Toyota-branded subcompact Mazda that’s radically better than a subcompact that it developed in house.
My guess is Mazda takes it back and starts selling it as Mazda2, which was the original plan.
Maybe it’s a good thing my wife and I just recently sold the 2011 tC. With exception to the xB, I never really saw much of anything Scion had on the lot that couldn’t (probably should) have been a Toyota. The initial target audience for Scion was exactly the demographic least likely to have the cash to buy a new car, despite Toyota’s dream of farming life-long Toyota owners. How quickly will they kill off the brand and rebadge production as Toyota? A tC as a Celica maybe? the iA as the new Yaris? The iM as a Corolla?
they might as well. at this point Scion is only slightly less pointless than Mercury was.
If this is true, who would have thought that Mitsubishi would be still selling cars in the USA longer then Scion?
They literally JUST rebuilt the local Toyota dealership to incorporate Scion signage and a separate showroom. As in demolished the old building and built a new one. I wonder how much money DCH wasted now….
GOOD RIDDANCE
It’s about time. The only “cool car” for kiddies they sold was the tC for about two years, and the original xB for about three years. Then the old people and Realtors moved in, and it was all downhill from there.
One time I left both my Zune and my Palm Pre in my Scion when I went shopping for an HD-DVD player at Circuit City.
Gosh you have such awful taste.
I kid, I still have a Zune right here. It’s incredibly reliable.
OK so living in a place where the nearest Toyota dealership is very nearby (we have one here in the county seat) but the nearest Scion dealership is a 130 miles away, Toyota could increase the sales of the vehicles that are currently Scions by selling them at the much more numerous Toyota dealerships.
Keep the FR-S, keep the tC, I don’t know if anything else deserves to continue – maybe that new Mazda that Toyota is selling as a Scion. There would be people even out here in the middle of nowhere who would buy them.
If they’d rename the iM as Matrix they would instantly triple or quadruple sales.
I can see a business case for everything in the lineup moving over to Toyota except the Mazda. Scion rebadging a car is one thing, for Toyota to do it would not be a good image.
xB is dead anyway
iM fills the void from the Matrix and provides Toyota a hatchback larger than the Yaris.
tC and FR-S would be the only coupes in the Toyota lineup (other than the Yaris).
So that’s only 3 additional models. I don’t see any issue with that – though the Toyota lineup is getting really full.
I just hope all those Littlest Angry Cars find good homes.
TOYOTA DEATHWATCH!!!!!
Who am I?
—
I rented a Camry in 2012 and when I drove over a pebble all the vents fell out in my lap. Then it harassed my wife, and when I tried to put a keg of beer in the back seat, it wouldn’t fit. I took it back to the rental office and they told me it was fine, so I kept it two weeks because it was awful. It wouldn’t even start usually, so I drove it all over the country.
Also the steering wheel was made of razor blades coated with asbestos.
I feel the need to pontificate on this daily.
It’s official:
http://pressroom.toyota.com/releases/scion+transition+toyota.htm
Scion Brand to Transition to Toyota
…snip…
As part of the brand transition, beginning in August 2016, MY17 Scion vehicles will be rebadged as Toyotas. The FR-S sports car, iA sedan and iM 5-door hatchback will become part of the Toyota family. The tC sports coupe will have a final release series edition and end production in August 2016. The C-HR, which recently debuted at the L.A. Auto Show, will be a part of the Toyota line-up.
I’m surprised they kept the iA. Maybe they had a contract with Mazda or something?
The iA is sold as a Yaris in Canada and IIRC will eventually replace the current French-sourced Yaris hatch.
So I wonder if they’ll attempt to break tradition and offer deals on outgoing Scion-badged vehicles. I’d be tempted at a lower-priced manual tranny iM just because…(even though we just recently sold our 2011 tC).
Toyota has plenty of names to use here in north america without having to continue using Alpha-Numeric gibberish used on the Scion Models. Just off the top of my head, there is:
– Carina
– Corona
– Celica
– Tercel
– Echo
– Matrix
– Harrier
– Paseo
– Starlet
– Supra
And I’m sure there are others…
go to Toyota.jp and look at some of the names they have there. Alphard, Vitz, ist, Lactis (is this one for new mothers or something?)
Lactis isn’t as good as the Fiat Panda Mamy.
FR-S has an 86 badge already on the car
iM > Corolla Hatch, why bother with Matrix or Auris
iA > Yaris