Chris Glenn, Stellantis’ vp of U.S. broker members of the family and retail methods, stated the plan is to preserve an “aggressive nature at retail, stay close with our business center, stay close with our dealers, communicating out our plans.
“We simply introduced this day a 60-day retail marketing campaign, which will probably be carried and supported at Tier 1 and Tier 2,” Glenn told Automotive News. “We’re now not taking our substructure off the fuel at the retail facet.”
After that 60-day promotion, Glenn said the company will transition to another sales event in the fall and is formulating a plan to close the year strong.
Sales by Jeep, Stellantis’ biggest brand, slipped 2.9 percent, marking its eighth straight quarterly decline. Although the brand was down overall, the Wrangler 4xe plug-in hybrid had its best quarter as deliveries jumped 56 percent from a year earlier. Total volume of the Wrangler, Jeep’s No. 2 seller after the Grand Cherokee, dropped 13 percent.
The Wrangler 4xe is America’s best-selling plug-in hybrid, followed by the Grand Cherokee 4xe at No. 2. Sales of the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid, No. 4 among plug-ins, more than doubled in the quarter.
Like much of the industry, Stellantis has battled headwinds in recent years. Glenn said production disruptions and logistics concerns “manufacture it a problem whilst you’re taking a look at quarter over quarter and day over day. The ones forms of issues can manufacture a too much.”
The idling of the Belvidere Assembly Plant in Illinois, which built the Jeep Cherokee, has left a void. Cherokee sales were down 35 percent in the second quarter.
“That walk of the D-segment is a dozen,” Glenn said. “There’s a dozen of quantity on a month-by-month foundation so from a gross sales man perspective, that makes it a modest bit tricky.”
In the first half of the year, Stellantis’ U.S. sales were down 1.3 percent, vs. a double-digit increase for the industry overall, according to the automakers who have reported so far. Getting enough inventory to dealers will be key to achieving gains in the second half.
“The call for for the product residue robust,” Glenn said. “At the retail facet, the sellers are searching for automobiles. They’re ordering the whole thing they are able to get their fingers on. They’re able to compete available on the market.
“On the fleet side, we’ve got strong demand for orders from our commercial customers, our fleet customers, so we’re feeling pretty good about the demand for our product.”
