• by Tanya Gazdik , Staff Writer, October 28, 2024

Editor's Note: This story ran in a previous edition.

It’s not every day you see national TV spots for vehicles that won’t go into production for more than two years. 

But that’s the scenario for Scout Motors’ Traveler SUV and Terra truck concept vehicles, which the company unveiled last week with major fanfare. 

It reminds me of the lengthy buildup to the introduction of Volkswagen’s ID.Buzz, which are finally hitting U.S. dealers. That vehicle was first shown as a concept car at the 2017 North American International Auto Show in Detroit. The production version was unveiled in March 2022, with production starting in June, first for the European market. 

The Scout vehicles, expected to be available in 2027, will be younger cousins to Buzz. VW acquired the Scout brand when it purchased Navistar, the successor company to International Harvester, in 2021. A year later, VW said it would revive the Scout brand as a line of EVs. 

Former Volkswagen of America CEO Scott Keogh left the brand in August 2022 to become president and CEO of Scout Motors. 

Chris Lindner, who has owned one of the original Scouts — a 1966 International Scout 800 — since high school, says that he is more excited about the return of the brand more so than the vehicles. 

Other than trucks, the new EVs will be nothing like the original rough-riding gas guzzlers. But heritage and nostalgia are a big part of the brand’s ethos, as evidenced by the first advertising coming out of Venables Bell & Partners. 

It’s no shock the agency got the assignment — Keogh was CMO of the the last automotive brand the agency worked on, Volkswagen’s luxury brand Audi, in 2021. 

A 90-second longform video is accompanied by a 30-second spot featuring the Harvester SUV. The agency also created a 74-second teaser video that focused on old models to hype the return of the brand. 

Unlike VW and Audi, the new Scouts will be sold direct-to-consumers online with completely transparent pricing. Customers can check them out in person at Scout Motors-owned retail locations, according to Cody Thacker, Scout’s vice president of growth. Reservations have already opened online and customers can pay $100 to reserve one of the SUVs or pickups. 

“Buying a Scout should be as easy as buying a T-shirt on Amazon,” Thacker says.  That would be a very expensive T-shirt — the models are expected to start at around $60,000. 

Thacker says the focus for the next several years is “unified messaging, unified branding, unified marketing.” 

“From there, it extends to all of the most important nodes of our operations — that’s reservations, demonstration drives, transactions, and financing and warranty service,” Thacker says.  “A direct sales model is the only model that offers us a true 360-degree view of the customer. It allows complete influence on the customer journey. And with that, we get access to unprecedented customer data, which then can drive deep insights, which can power the business, allow us to make smarter decisions.”

There's a lot to be gained down the road with this model, he says. 

"What you realize is greater financial returns," he says. "When you don't have the right customer data, when you don't have the full picture of the demand funnel, you're painting with a broad brush, you're launching national incentive programs that cost a lot of money. Because we have all of this data, we can now launch targeted incentive programs with surgical precision."

There's a lot to be said for launching a company with a clean slate, both Keogh and Thacker concurred. 

"We're reintroducing a brand to America," Thacker says. "We're launching a new platform, we're launching two new vehicles and we're launching a retail network. What we need from the frontline retail employees is full engagement, full enthusiasm and really full dedication to pushing product sales."