Any hopes or dreams of a convertible Toyota 86 (first spotted in Cape Town last year) or Subaru BRZ making it to your local dealership should be erased from your memory banks, because that is not going to happen. Not by a long shot.
Speaking at the recent L Auto Show, senior vice president of Scion, Doug Murtha, killed any reports and rumours about an open top version of this famous two-seater.
“I think we were pretty aggressive on our (submitted plan), but we looked at what we would have conceivably lost on the product and said, ‘We’re not going to even push it further,’” he said.
The reason for this kill-joy news is that both the Toyota and Subaru have dropped in sales over the course of 2014, and with both vehicles approaching the end of their life cycles, it would not be viable to create a new model.
The only way to counter this loss in sales is to bring special edition models to the market that could spike sales; even if only briefly.
“You get 24 months out of those products and they tend to have a steep fall-off (and) we’re seeing a little bit of that,” he says. “I don’t think that’s necessarily a surprise. I think the challenge is back to us to do some interesting things that keep the [vehicles] fresh.”
More bad news followed when Murtha revealed that turbocharged versions of these cars are also not going to happen. Without further elaboration, he only said: “that’s not something that’s coming”.
Source: CarAdvice.com.au
