What Is It Going To Take For Toyota To Save Scion?

The IQ will be the make or break car for Scion I believe. If not it may actually make Toyota a bit better for having less brands to put more focus on there existing products.

Producing cars that look like the modified ones in their commercials. They might get younger people excited, until they show up and realize how boring they actually are.

Scion needs better marketing, styling(interior especially) and cheaper prices.

Go global.

The Scion IQ will help, but then Toyota needs to avoid the Acura problem - that is taking well loved products like the Integra and Legend and blowing the customer goodwill. Scion had a great vehicle in the original XB, and yet the replacement was bloated and had known of the flair of the original - result sales and the brand start to tank.

Wake up it's the product fools. Also Kia's rodent marketing probably took some sales away too.

he IQ will be the make or break car for Scion I believe.

Producing cars that look like the modified ones in their commercials.

Wasn't this the gyst of an "article" a week or two ago?

Scion never hit the intended market, no matter what Toyota wants to say. The intention was to have Scions the stars of go-fast movies like "Fast and the Furious". It never happened because that crappy 1.5L 1NZ engine that they came with (with the exception of the tC) had no guts and even less tunability. The chassis were also a joke and drum brakes at the rear of any vehicle should be punishable by death. If Toyota wants to save Scion...better yet...if Toyota wants to CREATE Scion (as it was intended to be) in addition to what has been mentioned above, this is what MUST be done:

1) A turbocharger in every model. In this case outright power is not the issue, but the mere fact that the buyer can remove that turbocharger and bolt on a larger one for more power will pull sales.

2) Make the ECU codes openly available. Learn from young people. They LOVE open-source software. If the car can be plugged into alaptop and tuned without the requirement of a 3rd degree from MIT then it will pull sales.

3) 4 wheel disc brakes. I'm not even going to flog this any more because it should be openly apparent why this is NECCESSARY.

4) Make engineers available through messageboards. The tuner car crowd survives on messageboards. The problem is the general lack of true knowledge, as opposed to trial and error and seat-of-the-pants dynomometers. If a set of enginners are paid to surf the net and give advice, the community will appreciate that at the click of a mouse they will know exactly what is going on, and they will pull sales.

Just my two cents.

Well spoken Tango. The part about drum brakes is a pet peeve of mine also. Everytime I see a Honda Civic or Toyota Matrix I just shutter. And they want to know why they are losing sales to Kia.

RWD and AWD