Millennials becoming less keen on owning cars

Tokyo

WHEN Toyota Motor looked to the future at the turn of the millennium and aimed its new, edgy Scion small-car brand at 20-somethings, it could not have guessed that the model would be dead after just 12 years.

In killing off the brand last week, the Japanese company was responding to the changing habits of millennials - those born in the 1980s, 90s and 2000s - who are reshaping the traditional model of car ownership.

One of those behind the Scion brand told Reuters: "Surveys we do tell us young buyers are less interested in owning cars. They either don't have the financial leeway or they're substituting car ownership with ride-sharing or car-hailing services like Uber."

Toyota, which he said would redirect its Scion resources to its Toyota and Lexus models, launched the Scion brand hoping Generation Y-ers would become the grown-up Toyota buyers of tomorrow. It worked, for a while, with the brand selling 173,000 cars in 2006; then sales fell to just 56,167 last year, prompting the world's biggest car maker to call time. Some Scions will be r…