What! Say it isn’t so! Toyota has officially announced the Scion brand will be dissolved and the cars that make up the Scion lineup will now be brought back under the Toyota umbrella to be part of the model lineup. This announcement came quickly for most of us and the timeline is short as well, with August of this year being the official month we will no longer see Scion as a brand. This may seem strange since Scion just added the iA and iM to the lineup for 2016 to give us some new cars to enjoy and the FR-S is still a performance beauty we love.

Toyota is not so much giving up on the cars that make up the Scion brand, but the brand itself and what it stands for. This brand has been one that meant affordability and an easy to deal with sales experience with no-haggle pricing and most of the features already aboard making it easy to find the right car with the equipment you want. This lineup of vehicles was aimed at the younger buyers in the market to offer sporty and modern cars that are easy to drive and a lot of fun to own.

What this will do to the lineup of current Scion vehicles is simple. The FR-S coupe, iA sedan and iM hatchback will all become Toyota models while the tC will be discontinued after August. The concept vehicle that was presented at a recent car show, the C-HR will be sold as a Toyota when it comes to production. As you can easily see, other than the tC the lineup will remain intact, but will be rebadged as Toyota models.

Toyota has announced this decision is not an action that reflects brand failure on the part of Scion, but a need to allow the models to help meet the needs of the customers on the market today. Even though this brand was only launched in 2003 and is one of the shortest-lived brands ever, it served the purpose needed for a generation of car buyers, but the market and the customers have outgrown the “no frills, no haggle” identity of Scion.

While this brand certainly did attract the younger drivers, the number of cars sold in the US has steadily dropped over the past several years with the entire brand unable to sell as many vehicles as one model from Toyota. In fact, the entire brand accounted for only 2.2 percent of the US Toyota sales, which isn’t significant enough to carry forward as its own brand.

Because this brand has brought in a new age of drivers with the average age being around 29 years old, Toyota wants to continue to have the vehicles they want to buy. For this reason they will rebadge the current Scion models into Toyotas, except for the tC, which will give the Toyota name some great new models. The employees of Scion will be also brought into the Toyota family and find themselves a new place with the largest automotive company in the world.