That is certainly the case. But can be said for most other young drivers in any make of vehicle. I live next to two high schools and one major college, and the majority of them driving nearby are staring at their phones and not moving when the light turns green. Scary.

 

The Death of Scion Is an Opportunity for Toyota to Return to its Performance Roots
http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-cult...give-me-death/

 

It would be fun to have the Celica All-Trac back around again to compete with the WRX. Maybe make a couple of other more sedate/practical cars/wagons to compete with other Subaru models.

Another model I really miss is the Toyota Matrix, the 1st generation. That was a cool looking, cheap wagon with optional AWD, got great gas mileage, very roomy inside. That would be a good entry level car, something to slot below the Rav4.

 

If the iM comes over from Scion, then the Matrix market will be taken care of (minus the AWD). The C-HR Concept would be positioned below the Rav4 to compete against the onslaught of tiny crossovers namely the Juke, Renegade, 500X, CX-3, HR-V, and Trax.

 

Celica wont happen again... they are doing smaller than FRS, FRS, larger than FRS... all RWD.


I think they all should start doing more "sport" SUVs... so C-HR Sport and things like that... thats probably in the future. Nobody cares about cars anymore.

Besides, I think article is putting too much in Toyota vs Scion. Maybe because they got their cars delivered and didnt go into Scion dealership thats inside Toyota one. I dont see any difference for enthusiast driver if FRS has Toyota badge or not.

Still the fact is that FRS and iM, iA will continue on under Toyota brand but we will likely never see another xA, xB, iQ or even tC -like vehicles in the (Toyota) USA.... at least unless gas goes crazy again.

With Toyota brand getting iM, iA, FRS, C-HR and then likely larger coupe, I can see them killing some slower selling vehicles like maybe Prius v and possibly adding another large SUV to replace Sequoia . There are simply way too much vehicles under their dealerships right now after this merge.

 

+1

maybe this only applies to my city, but i see a significant handful of tC's with fart cans on the end. no problem here

 

On the same token, we understand why they had to create a Lexus brand?

 

Entirely different. Americans need the recognition of a luxury brand and dealer experience to be able to transact at the level these cars were going to be transacting at.

With Scion they were betting that a brand that appealed more to younger people could reach them better than just doing so as Toyota. They misjudged the role of brand with that demographic.

 

No-haggle pricing DID work at Saturn. The company's success in the 1990s was legendary. What killed Saturn off was horrible mismanagement after 2000. They dumped the excellent (and innovative) plastic-bodied compacts that had defined the brand for the first ten years, started switching to metal bodies and conventional designs, and essentially turned the brand into another mainstream GM division with no-haggle prices. Customers didn't buy it.....they wanted the cars that Saturn just didn't sell ay more.

 

Evidence suggests that no-haggle pricing does NOT work. Saturn, now Scion both no haggle are gone. Plus, they represent such a small market share that if successful one would assume that others would follow.

Very few people want no haggle. They may "think" they want no haggle or might misinterpret what it means in that they don't "like" haggling.

 

Then kindly explain why it DID work when it was tied to the right product. Saturn did not go downhill until after the plastic-bodied compacted were gone.

 

I have not seen any evidence that it actually DID work. Saturn was a niche brand that is almost barely a blip on the auto landscape.

 

There's some truth to that, but, as I saw it, they misjudged the styling and model-line more than the brand itself or its role. The shoebox xB, for example, actually became more attractive to some older folks than it did to the low-20s age group it was aimed at. With the iQ, its size was so small that most parents weren't about to get one for their teen-ager...just too risky in a crash. Ditto (more or less) for the xA and xD. And its (arguably) halo-car, the FR-S, ended up being shared with the Subaru BR-Z.

 

OK, then, please take the time to read this: This is from Forbes, a well-respected organization. It will explain exactly what happened:


http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/08/sat...g-failure.html

How GM Destroyed Its Saturn Success


General Motors is once again reshuffling its management team–a common occurrence ever since the government took control of the company to save it from bankruptcy last July. One has to keep asking what is so deeply wrong at GM that it can’t escape constant turmoil and ongoing struggle. And what really happened to its Pontiac, Hummer and Saturn brands?

A look at the story of the Saturn Corporation provides some answers. Saturn, a GM company that had great promise in the early 1990s, ultimately failed because senior GM leaders couldn’t see the benefits of new ways of doing things and a new kind of organizational culture.

In the 1980s Roger Smith, then GM’s chief executive, and Donald Ephlin, head of the United Auto Workers for the company, stood together behind the creation of a new kind of American carmaker, but their successors were less committed to breaking with tradition. The initial passion and vision gradually dissipated, and now it is being officially extinguished. Saturn stopped production in October and is expected to close down completely later this year. Apparently GM and the UAW really didn’t want a “different kind of company” or a “different kind of car.”

The company was launched at a time when confidence in American cars and the morale of American autoworkers were both plummeting. Smith and Ephlin wanted to prove that a U.S. car company could hold its own against formidable foreign competition. The basic concepts behind the Saturn Corporation were simple and self-evident: having a team of people who were committed to both their customers’ needs and one another’s success; demanding accountability for results and developing multi-skill flexibility throughout the system so that team members could work and assist others wherever there was a need; treating all stakeholders as partners, because that was exactly what they were; doing whatever it took to be competitive with the best carmakers in the world.

I became acquainted with Saturn first hand when it became my client in 1993. I worked with all its leadership team members and interviewed people representing every hierarchical level, function and work assignment. Then I became an owner of a 1994 Saturn SL-2. Depending on your point of view, I either know enough to sift reality from mythology or I was infected with the Saturn disease.

Whenever the name Saturn has come up in my conversations through the years, it has usually gotten either of two opposite responses. People either admired the company and its cars or were skeptical, cynical and belittling of anything it did. Some of the most passionate in the latter group were GM managers, employees and UAW officials in other GM divisions. They resented Saturn and are happy to see it go. But here are some impressive early accomplishments that were largely unpublicized at the time and have been forgotten in the years since.

–Because of an enthusiastic market response to their “different kind of car,” Saturn retailers were chronically short of vehicles for the first five years of production.

–Saturn was the third best-selling car model in the U.S. in 1994. When the production lines switched over to the 1995 models, there were only 400 ’94 Saturns left on lots across the country.

–J.D. Powers consistently rated Saturn as among the top three cars in owner and customer sales satisfaction. Even as late as 2000 it ranked second in owner satisfaction, behind Lexus.

–Most of the 9,000 Saturn employees (at the mid-1990s peak) came from other GM plants, through an agreement between GM and the UAW. This different kind of company was created by people who all came from the old, traditional kind of company. They changed the way they thought about the workplace, committed themselves to being world-class and altered many work habits to keep their promises to their customers. And they did so without any external incentives.

–Thanks to a unique partnership between Saturn and its retailers, in 1993 the retailers rebated back to Saturn 1% of the cars’ sales price, to get GM’s permission to start a third production shift. That brought $13 million to Saturn’s bottom line, moving its finances into the black a year ahead of plan.

–Owner enthusiasm went off the charts, as was demonstrated when nearly 100,000 owners attended two “homecoming” celebrations in 1994 and 1999.

But that was then and this is now. What happened to that 1990s success story? Despite what you may read elsewhere, there were just two underlying forces behind Saturn’s demise: GM’s insistence on managing all its divisions centrally with a tight fist, and the demand by leadership at both GM and the UAW that Saturn get in line with traditional ways of doing things.

As I learned from many GM executives at Saturn and elsewhere, GM manages its businesses monolithically. When it launched Saturn, it told the other divisions they couldn’t have any money to upgrade or introduce new models, because the Saturn launch was gobbling up all the funds. Hence everyone in the GM family was hostile toward and jealous of the new arrival. The same dynamic hit Saturn again a few years later when the market shifted and it desperately needed a midsize car and an SUV. Sorry, GM leadership said. It was the other divisions’ time to get the money. Everyone had to take a turn–and every division was penalized in the process.

GM also came to want Saturn to be like the rest of its offerings, a compilation of standard GM parts with a different nameplate, not a different kind of car. Saturn’s unique power train (the so called “smart” transmission), its polymer body panels that didn’t dent or rust, its sand-cast aluminum engine block and its no hassle, no dickering retail sales experience–those were all nice experiments, but they weren’t really the GM way. Company leaders even lectured Saturn that the GM way was more profitable, because it used the same parts across many automobile platforms.

Just as GM management wanted to scrap the different kind of car, the UAW wanted to end the unique memorandum of agreement between Saturn and UAW Local 1810 that permitted profit sharing, more rigorous accountability for results, multi-skills assignments and job flexibility. Despite Saturn’s early success, Local 1810 came under constant fire from above to get in line. One local president was removed from his position by the UAW, and a successor was treated as a heretic for wanting, as he put it, to “create a viable model for the labor union in our modern era.”

Three times the UAW International came to Saturn’s Spring Hill, Tenn., production facility with its international contract in hand and told Saturn’s workers to vote for it. Three times those workers voted no and clung to their memorandum of agreement. (Which, by the way, was the size of a brochure, not the volumes one typically sees in such agreements; when the commitment is clear and genuine and the partners trust each other, you don’t need volumes to document your agreement.) A local union membership rejecting the standard labor contract? Such a thing had never happened before, at least not in the auto industry.

The problem, GM and UAW executives came to realize, was the new organizational culture that had been born in Spring Hill. Saturn people didn’t think of themselves as GM subordinates or as UAW card carriers. They were Saturn team members with a common mission.

The only way to overpower such a culture is to draw and quarter it. GM, with the UAW’s obvious blessing, broke up the Saturn empire. Production was taken out of Spring Hill and divided among other GM plants. Saturn’s workers, now only one small piece of a larger population, became part of the larger GM workforce in their new locations and subject to the UAW International contract.

Unity was achieved. Tradition was protected. Everyone was back in line.

To all the outsiders who have witnessed Saturn’s failure, if you ever find your corporation in a losing position in the marketplace, if you feel your people just can’t compete with world-class, if you don’t believe your organization can make enough changes to stay in the race, or if you feel someone else needs to bail you out, just remember–you can create a different kind of company and a world-class product.

That is Saturn’s legacy.

 

And what was wrong with that assumption? The general opinion of teenagers is not to be seen driving their Dads o-yawn Camry / Corolla but something more youthful.

By the way, Lexus went through the same phase of not being accepted as a Luxury brand but perseverance and refinement in execution paid off. With the low end brand, corporate probably did not want to throw money after more money to bring recognition to their lower youth end segment.