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Toyota to kill Scion brand [w/video]

Toyota Motor Co. said Wednesday it will kill its youth-oriented Scion brand, ending a 13-year experiment that attracted new customers but ultimately drained resources from the parent company. The FR-S sports car, iA sedan, and iM five-door hatchback will be re-badged as Toyotas starting in August for the 2017 model year, and the tC coupe will end production then. The C-HR displayed at the Los Angeles Auto Show will become a Toyota vehicle when it launches. Scion's 22 dedicated team members will be given opportunities to join Toyota. Toyota says it made the decision in response to customers' needs, noting it finds younger buyers want practicality in addition to the individualistic styling and features that Scion offered. Meanwhile, Toyota's own vehicles have gotten sportier, which the company says appeals to younger buyers. Scion claimed some successes, pointing to its average customer age of 36 years old, with 70 percent of its buyers new to Toyota. Scion sold more than a million vehicles since it launched. Its best year was 2006, when it sold 173,034 vehicles. Sales declined steadily in 2007-08 and then crashed in 2009 during the recession to 57,961 units, before bottoming out in 2010 with only 45,678 sales. "This isn't a step backward for Scion; it's a leap forward for Toyota. Scion has allowed us to fast track ideas that would have been challenging to test through the Toyota network," said Jim Lentz, founding vice president of Scion and now CEO, Toyota Motor North America. "I was there when we established Scion and our goal was to make Toyota and our dealers stronger by learning how to better attract and engage young customers. I'm very proud because that's exactly what we have accomplished." While Scion never recovered from its drastic sales decline, it served as a test bed for marketing and dealer tactics that helped its parent company. Scion tried out no-haggle pricing, a streamlined option plan (some cars had only two choices: color and transmission) and a pre-paid maintenance plan. "We appreciate our 1,004 Scion dealers and the support they've given the brand," said Bob Carter, Toyota senior vice president of automotive operations. "We believe our dealers have gained valuable insights and have received a strong return on their investment.

Here are a few of our automotive guilty pleasures

It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway. The world is full of cars, and just about as many of them are bad as are good. It's pretty easy to pick which fall into each category after giving them a thorough walkaround and, more important, driving them. But every once in a while, an automobile straddles the line somehow between good and bad — it may be hideously overpriced and therefore a marketplace failure, it may be stupid quick in a straight line but handles like a drunken noodle, or it may have an interior that looks like it was made of a mess of injection-molded Legos. Heck, maybe all three. Yet there's something special about some bad cars that actually makes them likable. The idea for this list came to me while I was browsing classified ads for cars within a few hundred miles of my house. I ran across a few oddballs and shared them with the rest of the team in our online chat room. It turns out several of us have a few automotive guilty pleasures that we're willing to admit to. We'll call a few of 'em out here. Feel free to share some of your own in the comments below. Dodge Neon SRT4 and Caliber SRT4: The Neon was a passably good and plucky little city car when it debuted for the 1995 model year. The Caliber, which replaced the aging Neon and sought to replace its friendly marketing campaign with something more sinister, was panned from the very outset for its cheap interior furnishings, but at least offered some decent utility with its hatchback shape. What the two little front-wheel-drive Dodge models have in common are their rip-roarin' SRT variants, each powered by turbocharged 2.4-liter four-cylinder engines. Known for their propensity to light up their front tires under hard acceleration, the duo were legitimately quick and fun to drive with a fantastic turbo whoosh that called to mind the early days of turbo technology. — Consumer Editor Jeremy Korzeniewski  Chevrolet HHR SS: Chevy's HHR SS came out early in my automotive journalism career, and I have fond memories of the press launch (and having dinner with Bob Lutz) that included plenty of tire-smoking hard launches and demonstrations of the manual transmission's no-lift shift feature. The 260-horsepower turbocharged four-cylinder was and still is a spunky little engine that makes the retro-inspired HHR a fun little hot rod that works quite well as a fun little daily driver.

Toyota finds profit in Europe thanks to hybrid sales

In the land of diesel, Toyota appears to be making money its own way and thereby making more of it. The Japanese automaker is taking on Europe's diesel-centric ways by substantially boosting sales of hybrids on the continent. That, along with cost cutting measures, has increased the company's European profitability, Automotive News says, citing recent remarks by Toyota's European operations chief Didier Leroy. Toyota, which lost money in Europe between 2008 and 2011, started turning things around two years ago by cutting labor at places like UK factories while consolidating production of models such as the Auris and Yaris hybrid vehicles. During the most recently completed financial year, Toyota Europe reported earnings that were up 75 percent from the year before, despite revenue being up just five percent. The company also aims to sell at least 1 million vehicles in Europe by next year and is boosting sales in countries like Russia. Late last year, Didier told Bloomberg News that Toyota's European market share was rising about one percentage point a year, while production at Toyota's factories in countries like France, Turkey and the UK were running at full capacity. Toyota estimated at the time that hybrids accounted for about a fifth of Toyota's European sales.