Scion

» see scion.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Toyota had a problem that every large carmaker eventually gets. Its customers were loyal and they were aging, the average age of a Toyota buyer kept climbing, and people in their twenties were not walking into the showrooms. The answer, launched at a handful of California dealers in June 2003 and sold across the country by February 2004, was a separate badge with its own cars and its own way of selling them. The word scion means an heir, which was the joke: a brand deliberately built with no history attached to it.

Sales peaked almost immediately. The 2006 calendar year moved 173,034 vehicles. For a marque three years old with three models that was a real number, and the line went down from there and kept going down. The 2008 crash removed the young buyers with no money who had been the entire premise. Toyota went on replacing the lineup anyway. By the middle of the decade a Scion showroom held a Mazda2 wearing a Scion grille next to a Subaru-built coupe.

North America is as far as it ever went. The cars themselves were mostly Japanese-market Toyotas with different badges, so a Turkish driver could stand next to an iQ or an Auris here and be looking at the same vehicle an American knew under a different name. Toyota has been building cars at Adapazarı in Sakarya since 1994 and the brand that never showed up on any of them is this one.

~ the case file ~

~ pure price ~

The selling method was the part that was actually new. Every Scion came in a single trim at a non-negotiable price printed on the window, and instead of choosing between a base model and a loaded one you bought the car and then added dealer-installed options from a menu. No haggling, no trim walk, no four hours in a finance office. For a generation that had watched their parents do the dealership dance this was close to the whole pitch.

It worked better for customers than for dealers. Margins were thin by design and a Scion sale earned less than a Camry sale, so the brand depended on Toyota dealers agreeing to devote floor space to something that made them less money per unit on the promise of a buyer who would come back for a Toyota in ten years. Once volume fell, that promise stopped being convincing.

~ the xB problem ~

The first-generation xB was a Toyota bB from the Japanese market, a tall narrow box on a small footprint, and in the United States it landed in the middle of a customization scene that had been waiting for exactly that shape. Cheap, square, endless aftermarket. It became the car the brand was actually known for.

Then Toyota replaced it in 2008 with a second generation that was longer and heavier and carried a bigger engine, because American reviewers had said the first one was underpowered. The people who bought the original did not want a bigger one. Sales of the xB fell and never recovered, and the lesson is one that the industry keeps relearning, which is that a car bought for being odd does not survive being made normal.

~ the last marque ~

Toyota announced the end on 3 February 2016 and did it without drama, which is rarer than it sounds for a dead brand. There was no fire sale and no orphaning. The FR-S became the Toyota 86. The iA became the Yaris iA. The iM became the Corolla iM. Warranty coverage carried over to Toyota dealers unchanged. Only the tC was actually killed, ending production in August 2016 with a final Release Series. Roughly a million Scions had been sold in thirteen years, and the badge on the back of most of them was quietly swapped for a Toyota one at the next service visit if the owner asked.

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