Carmakers Retreat From Quirky Designs as Millennials Embrace Mainstream
It
was not too long ago that automakers were tripping over themselves in
pursuit of younger buyers, offering boxy wagons and small,
jellybean-shape city cars. The Scion xB, the Honda Element, the Nissan Cube: All were funky departures for Generation X from the dowdy minivans of their parents.
But times and tastes change. When Toyota
announced last week that it would mothball its youth-oriented Scion
brand, it punctuated a broader retreat in the industry from quirkier car
designs, particularly at the low end of the market.
Today's
younger buyers, loosely referred to as Generation Y, have embraced a
term that would have turned off their immediate forebears.
"Compared
to Gen X, Gen Y is very mainstream," said Michelle Krebs, senior
analyst for Autotrader. "They see the car as a symbol of their
accomplishments and aspirations. They're into very established, highly
respected global brands, whereas Gen X always wanted something different
from what their parents drove."
But
they have little taste or patience for Scion, an American subsidiary
founded by Toyota in 2003 explicitly to woo younger buyers. After
reaching peak sales of 173,000 a year in 2006, the Scion plunged as low
as 45,000 in 2010 . Some of its models will survive, but under the
Toyota name.
Instead,
younger buyers have embraced conservatively styled crossovers and sport
utility vehicles. Even once-moribund Buick is attracting millennials
with its strong-selling Encore compact crossover.
Scion
never strayed far from the formula it concocted when "The Fast and the
Furious" referred to one movie, not a $4 billion Hollywood juggernaut.
Central
to the Scion recipe were unconventional exterior designs ripe for
personalization. The so-called tuner culture that blossomed in the 1990s
in Southern California readily adopted the cars, with their sub-$20,000
sticker prices, idiosyncratic yet malleable styling and easily upgraded
exhaust and engine-management systems. Scions were underbaked by
design.
"Toyota
is, 'measure 17 times, cut once,' whereas Scion was more, 'measure
twice, cut once,' " said Jack Hollis, group vice president of marketing
for Toyota's American subsidiary, Toyota Motor Sales. "Being progressive
wasn't something that came easy for Toyota 13 or 14 years ago. Scion
was a laboratory for experimentation."
Mr.
Hollis, who previously served as vice president of Scion, added: "We
had the lowest median age buyer in the market, so the recession hit us
hard." But while other carmakers roared back, with a record 17.5 million
passenger vehicles sold in 2015, Scion's numbers never recovered.
Mini,
the emblematic British brand resurrected by the BMW Group of Germany at
the dawn of the millennium, has also struggled against the preference
of millennials for more staid - and bigger - cars, with American sales
of the Mini relatively flat since 2012.
The
asymmetrical Cube from Nissan, a vehicle whose emphatic strangeness was
unrivaled in the United States market, was discontinued in 2014.
Production of the Honda Element, an airy four-door beloved by dog owners
for its crate-ready rear load area and easily cleaned interior, was
stopped in 2011.
Mr.
Hollis said that the initial success of the Scion FR-S, a well-reviewed
sports coupe, was attributable in part to its "being mainstream." But
consumers gave a wan embrace to the Scion iQ, a tiny runabout aimed at
urban dwellers. "It didn't work as well," he said of the iQ experiment.
Stewart
Reed has a front-row seat to aesthetic shifts in the industry, as
chairman of the transportation design program at the Art Center College
of Design in Pasadena, Calif., one of the car industry's top incubators
of global design talent. Mr. Reed recalled that the original Scion xB,
whose resolutely boxy body scored a knockout for unfashionable design,
sold strongly through its first generation.
"The profile that it struck in the landscape was quite interesting," he said.
But
the second generation of that car proved to be the beginning of the end
for Scion as a stand-alone brand. A heavier, rounder xB polarized the
Scion faithful just in time for the economic downturn. "As the new xB
came in, I remember people responding by buying up the old one,
essentially hoarding them," Mr. Reed said.
Those
hoarders are among a devout core who will remain Scion's champions.
Among them is Noel Barnum, 25, a medical telemetry technician in Long
Beach, Calif.
"The
audience will still be there," he said. "Scion punched the scene in the
mouth. They could release these weird-looking cars that looked like
toasters and do really well with them."
Mr.
Barnum's FR-S coupe bears the hallmarks of a Scion die-hard who spent
liberally in the aftermarket for an enormous rear deck lid wing, a
pavement-scraping front chin splitter, a body kit and outsize custom
alloy wheels. Blame for Scion's failure to meet shifting tastes among
young buyers did not lie with the design studios, Mr. Barnum said, but
with the marketing department.
"The
xB II was substantially higher-priced than the first-gen car," he said.
"And at that price, all of a sudden you could start thinking RAV4," he
said, referring to Toyota's best-selling compact crossover.
Indeed,
as it winds down the Scion brand, Toyota is describing its laboratory
experiment as a success, claiming that 45 percent of Scion owners
remained in the Toyota group of brands for their next purchase or lease.
Given
the cyclical nature of the car business, unconventional designs may
resonate anew with younger buyers entering the market. But for the time
being, an old saying in the auto industry has been flipped on its head.
"Right now, you can't really say: 'You can sell a young man's car to an
old man, but you can't sell an old man's car to a young man,' " Mr. Reed
said. "It's a make-you-smile shift."
by:nytimes.com
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