Echo to be discontinued?

[DaemonSpawn]

I read that the Echo will be discontinued in the US. Is this true for Canada as well? There's no way the hatchback will be discontinued but what about the sedan?

Please help!

[bgrieger]

Toyota is supposed to be replacing the echo with 2 other cars...likely whatever the next gen yaris/vitz are. They also have an inbetween size between the corolla and the echo that might become the sedan, leaving the vitz platform hatch. Of course, they may rationalize the import of hatches and standardize on the coming revamped scion Xa...too early to tell yet.

Bob

[DaemonSpawn]

Hi,

Thanks for the quick reply. The reason I asked the question is because in Canada, we already have the hatchback but we don't have Scion branded vehicles. Also, Echo sales account for 25% of small car sales in Canada and 50% of small cars in Quebec...and that was before the hatchback was introduced. So my point was, is the discontinuation of the sedan effective only for the US or is it intended for Canada as well? I know for a fact that they will be keeping the hatchbacks in Canada, but how can they rationalize discontinuing the sedan when it's still pretty popular here?

[bgrieger]

While the echo sells well here, the sedan has soft US sales appeal. They want to only bring one subcompact to north america. It saves a lot of tooling and transport cash if they can keep the lineup a little smaller, so the sedan will change to match whatever the US uses.

They recognize that most people, even in the demographic, think in general that it is between "blah" and "ugly as sin" in current form...I'll admit I only looked at echos after the hatch was introduced and would need to be paid to take a sedan off the lot...In the end, we only got the hatch because the US got the scion, and Toyota didn't want to roll them out here under the Toyota name, or pay for the dealer network. Why follow the subcompact curve when you have the lineup already to build it.

Bob