CORRECTED - Small is beautiful for Toyota's Scion-but big too
In Jan. 28 New Orleans story headlined "INTERVIEW-Small is beautiful for Toyota's Scion -- but big too" please change 6th paragraph to read ... National Automobile Dealers Association's" ... instead of ... National Automobile Association's (correcting group's name)
A corrected repetition follows.
By Tom Brown
NEW ORLEANS, Jan 28 (Reuters) - Small may beautiful for Toyota Motor Corp.'s (7203.T: Quote, Profile, Research) upstart Scion brand, a new lineup of compact vehicles targeted at young U.S. car buyers.
But Scion, which has only been on sale for one full year, already rivals the likes of venerable nameplates like Volvo in total U.S. sales.
And James Farley, the Torrance, California-based, Toyota executive who runs Scion, says it is having more success than anyone with a segment of the U.S. vehicle market that faces enormous growth potential.
Scion has begun to prove, in fact, that car makers really can aspire to sell to what many old-school automakers still deride as a non-existent "youth market."
With a current lineup of just two small cars and a tiny van, Scion is targeted at so-called Generation Y buyers, a population defined by Scion as people born between 1980 and 1994.
Farley spoke in an interview on Friday ahead of the opening of the National Automobile Dealers Association's annual convention here. He said he sees Gen Y accounting for a massive 63 million buyers in the U.S. car market alone by the end of this decade.
That means Gen Y could soon generate one out of every four car customers in the United States.
"We have not seen a population -- new explosion of population -- like this since the boomers," Farley told Reuters. "The boomers all had a bunch of kids and they're now old enough to drive."
Farley said Scion, which started up in California and has only seen its vehicles sold nationally since June last year, expected to increase total U.S. sales of 99,259 vehicles in 2004 to about 120,000 cars and vans in 2005.
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