Dealers are waiting to see whether the market will want all of these electrified vehicles from Stellantis.
The Wrangler 4xe has been a success story that has drawn a broader customer profile than what Randy Dye, chairman of the Stellantis National Dealer Council, was expecting. Stellantis said it sold 29,000 of the plug-in Wranglers in its first year.
Dye, who owns Daytona Dodge-Chrysler-Jeep-Ram in Florida, said the industry is still learning about who its audience is for electrified vehicles and how they’re adjusting to the nuances of owning them.
“I think Tavares said it well: EVs are not an industry idea, it’s a political idea,” Dye said. “I want the free market to decide what kind of cars we should have, and then it’s incumbent upon the OEM to deliver.”
Dye remembers the days when Fiat Chrysler Automobiles stood back while the industry released scores of electrified models. He knew back then that the automaker eventually would jump into the fray, but he wasn’t sure how it would execute.
“I’ve felt this coming for quite some time,” Dye said. “Was it going to be something that we did as the former FCA, was it going to be in cooperation with somebody else? There was never any doubt about whether we were going to be doing something like this. I think the question was, with who? If you go back to the [Sergio] Marchionne comments, he envisioned a bigger company like this. I think this was the ultimate goal.”
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