The Father of the Hellcats is back and he didn’t come out of retirement to mess around. Stellantis is in a tough spot and the automotive Goliath just outlined a massive turnaround plan that will place a $13 billion bet on the United States as part of a larger plan including 60 new vehicles and 50 refreshes by 2030. It’s an insane sprint.
In Detroit, Michigan, Head of American Brands, Ram CEO, and head of SRT, Tim Kuniskis, exclusively sat own with The Drive for a one-on-one discussion on the latest episode of The Drivecast. Kuniskis laid out and discussed in depth the automaker’s product offensive for the U.S. market, including the Dodge Copperhead, Jeep Scrambler, cost-consciouss Chrysler models, Dodge GLH/Hornet, the Ramcharger, more.
The latest episode of The Drivecast goes behind the curtain and inside Stellantis’ plan to recover lost marketshare, expand product in showrooms, and reclaim their enthusiast street cred with halo models. Kuniskis speaks to how the lack of vehicles costing less than $40,000 hurts the automaker today. Of course, the Ram Rumble Bee and its Hellcat-powered SRT model’s debut is on the table, but the why and how is revealed.
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Full Transcript
Joel: Hello everyone and welcome to the Drivecast. I’m Joel Feder, Director of Content and Product at the Drive. The Drivecast is our weekly podcast giving you an inside behind-the-scenes look at the biggest stories, controversies, and people shaping the automotive industry. Today, we have a special episode for you. I promised you on episode one that this wouldn’t just be another automotive podcast, and to date, we’ve delivered on all the promises. Today, we’re doubling down on sharing our inside access with you. Today’s topic is Stellantis, and I’ll be joined by a special guest that to any enthusiast needs no introduction.
He’s known as the father of the Hellcats, but his official titles include Ram CEO, Head of America Brands for Stellantis, and Head of SRT. Naturally, it’s Tim Kuniskis. Tim and I sat down while in Detroit together to discuss the turnaround plans for the automotive Goliath. Stellantis has been rocked. The automaker built its current foundation upon loud noises and fast times at the drag strip, all while making loud boom boom noises thanks to the Hemi and legendary Hellcat V8 powertrain.
Then the party ended. It was late to the electric game, many of its EVs didn’t even launch and were just DOA from the get go. SRT was mothballed, and things just looked bleak again. Seriously, the 300 died, and somehow Chrysler is a brand that has one vehicle, the Pacifica minivan. That’s it. But there’s a vocal and passionate community that rallies around Mopar and these iconic brands. The heritage is definitely a thing, but so too is the modern-day image it has built for itself.
RAM trucks have the nicest interior of any full-size truck money buys today. The Hellcats—well, they roared their way into the history books. And that’s before addressing the Durango that seemingly will live forever but gives buyers the fantastic tow rating and a V8 in a segment where none of that can be had elsewhere. Stellantis says there’s hope and even a plan. Last year Stellantis appointed a new CEO, Antonio Filosa. The man seems ready to globalize, modernize, and turnaround Stellantis.
And a year and a half ago, Tim Kuniskis came out of retirement and took the reins for Ram, Stellantis brands in North America, and even brought back SRT last summer. If nothing else, the man knows passion, and passion sells. Or at a minimum, it gets people in a showroom, right? You all read about the Copperhead and Scrambler on the Drive, not to mention the return of the Rumble Bee with the Hellcat powertrain. You can also bet exactly why these things are coming and/or just returned.
Here to dissect all of it with me and give us some deeper insights from Detroit is Kuniskis himself. So today, it’s behind the scenes on Stellantis’s turnaround plan and what comes next. By the way, if you like what we’re doing here, do us a favor and hit us with a five-star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It really does help get the Drivecast in front of more people. Okay, let’s go.
Joel: All right, so today we’re here in Michigan, Detroit, and we’re with Tim Kuniskis. Father of the Hellcat, also head of the American brands, CEO of Ram, he’s in charge of SRT. You’re the man with the purse strings and the keys for a lot of things, and you’re Filosa’s right hand for America, yeah?
Tim: No, you’re giving me way too much credit there. I am an employee that works for Antonio, and I have the honor to do a lot of cool stuff.
Joel: I would agree with the honor to do cool stuff. Honestly, you’re—I mean, we’ve had a long history and a long relationship from the Hellcats being birthed to the Hellcats dying to the Hellcats coming back, to all those things. But I mean, I remember stories of you being with your dad, I mean you’re a car guy’s car guy. You grew up on the strip with your dad. I remember talking about you drilling holes in the front shocks with your dad before a drag strip race and then the oil would leak out and then the front end would lift and something like that. You remember this story?
Tim: You’re close. My dad wasn’t really that involved in it, but most of the story’s right. Um, we used to get to the strip and disconnect the end links on our sway bar for the weight transfer. And then obviously, you know, switch to slicks. But we would bring all this stuff in the trunk of our cars, and back then the trunks weren’t all lined the way they are today. So if you took a tight turn, all the stuff in your trunk would slide to one side and just put a huge dent in your quarter panel.
So if you think about when we launched the ’18 Demon, you’re like, where did this idea of this foam insert in the crate come from that fits inside the trunk to hold everything from moving around? It was “live and learn” from the 17-year-old Tim popping holes in quarter panels from shit rolling around in the back of the car. That’s where it came from.
Joel: I still remember this interview from almost a decade ago. So you’re a car guy’s car guy, and today we saw a ton of new product—a ton of new product that is planned to be here in the next four-ish years by 2030. A huge amount of money being spent, a huge investment in capital in terms of technology and cars. Obviously in terms of enthusiast stuff, we saw some pretty cool stuff. I’d love to talk to you first and foremost about the Copperhead, obviously.
I saw it, you looked at me when I saw it. My eyes kind of lit up. It’s really cool. It looks cool, and I’ve already described on the site, you know, it definitely looks like hard points of a Charger, but there’s some Viper-esque things to it with the ducktail and the pinched rear end and the rear window. It looks front-engined. Can we speak at all to—there’s definitely exhaust pipes on that car that I saw today. Can we speak at all to what might power that car?
Tim: So there’s definitely exhaust pipes, so it is a combustion engine in it. I will tell you that it is not the hard points of a Charger.
Joel: Not the hard points of a Charger?
Tim: Not the hard points of a Charger. You couldn’t get a Charger with those proportions and that stance because of the multi-energy design of where the battery is encapsulated in the bottom of the car—without cheating. I mean, you know, just for like a show car or whatever, but that car’s not cheated. Those are real hard points, real production-intent proportions.
That’s not—I’m not giving you some exclusive saying, “Hey, we’re absolutely building this car and it’s coming then.” I’m just telling you that it is—it’s not cheated. It’s not a concept car; it’s a “we could actually do this exactly the way you saw it.” It would have a combustion engine. Don’t really know what it would be yet at this point.
We have some ideas and some things that we’re kicking around. It could be something that you’re not aware of. It could be something that doesn’t exist today. It’s very easy to look at the current portfolio and say, “Okay, it’s a Hemi, it’s a this, it’s a that.” But this is a car that’s committed to be here between now and 2030, so there could be another engine coming that nobody’s aware of that would be the perfect engine for that.
And whenever I bring that up, people automatically say, “Oh, well then it’s going to be a T6.” No, doesn’t mean that at all. But we are toying around with some new technology that you will see this summer. We plan to have an engineering innovation day right before Roadkill Nights—a full day of some of the really cool tech stuff that we’re working on. Not a new car, but really cool tech stuff that you’ll see filter into some of that sheet metal that you saw today. And that—when you come to that day—then the light bulb will go off and you’ll be like, “Okay, I got it.”
Joel: So are the hard points of that car unrelated to anything?
Tim: I’m not going to give you that much of a clue, but there are some synergies built into that car. SRT only works if SRT can take sunken investments from around the globe and leverage those. Because if you try to make high-performance halo cars and you try to make them bespoke, it will never pay back. I mean, it’s—it’s like racing for the sake of racing. I mean, it’s ego. You have to take investments that are already sunk and then leverage those. So there’s stuff in that car that are production-intent in other things that we’ll leverage very heavily.
Joel: And the powertrain sounds like it just hasn’t—we haven’t formally got to the point where we might all get the hints for that yet.
Tim: Well, we know exactly what we want it to be, but we’re not ready to share it yet.
Joel: Could a hybrid V8 work in a platform like that?
Tim: Yeah, it could. A car like that, though, it’s not—it’s not a car that you buy today that you’re going to drive for, you know, three years, four years, five years and then trade into something else. A car like that is generally a keeper car, you know?
Joel: Collector’s car?
Tim: Not—I don’t—maybe a collector’s car, maybe not a collector’s car, but definitely a keeper’s car. You know, you buy a car like that, you know, like buying a really special watch, and you may sell it later, but your intent is, “I want to keep this forever, I want to give this to my kids” or whatever. If you get the equation right, that’s what it should be, right? That’s the only way it builds a halo. It’s close enough to be accessible but far enough that you gotta make a bad decision to get it, and that’s what makes it desirable, right? My job is to entice people to make bad decisions.
So the idea for hybridization—sure, you can do it. But let’s say you put, you know, E-motors in it and lithium-ion batteries. What will that be in 30 years? It’ll be an 8-track. You’re like, “Hey, I got this DVD, where can I play it?” No, you—you can’t. So my goal is to have something that would be timeless and somewhat future-proofed.
Joel: So Hellephant would not be future-proofed.
Tim: I gave you a huge clue, and you can take it however you want.
Joel: Okay. Because a 426 Hellephant would be pretty interesting.
Tim: I gave you a huge clue, and you can take it however you want. And I’ll bet you when you come to Roadkill Nights, you’ll be like, “I got it.”
Joel: It was interesting, before I saw Copperhead today, one of the questions I wanted to ask you today was about SRT and whether a Viper in the world has a place. And the reason I wanted to ask that is because now we’re running around in a world where we have C8 Corvettes that cost 220 grand and they have Bugatti levels of power. That’s a whole different timeline than when the Viper existed and died, right? And so I was going to ask you about Viper today and whether it made sense in the portfolio. I suppose we could still address it, but—
Tim: No, I mean, I love that question, thank you. Because I think about C8 all the time. I am incredibly impressed with the engineering of that car. There’s some things I don’t like, of course, you know, and I’m biased, obviously. But there’s some things that were in that car—and I’ve had a chance to meet Tadge and talk to him about the car in the past—and it’s an impressive car, and the engineering in it is highly impressive.
I told you a long time ago that when we were doing the Charger and Challenger, as much as we respect Mustang and Camaro, we weren’t trying to build a Mustang and Camaro competitor because they already exist. We’re not with this car trying to build a C8 competitor. Absolutely not. Why would I? It exists, they do really well with it, they sell, you know, 25, 30 thousand. I question the range; I question the $65,000 up to $250,000. But you know what? They’re getting away with it, so good for them. I don’t want to follow that, though; I don’t want to chase that. They’re a sports car. I’m very, very clearly defining this as a hyper-muscle car.
Joel: You did say that.
Tim: It’s a different thing.
Joel: And a Viper as a Viper is itself.
Tim: A Viper is a sports car. This is a hyper-muscle car.
Joel: Does a Viper make sense anymore, or that era is probably gone?
Tim: Look, the Gen 5 Viper was one of the most beautiful cars ever built.
Joel: Love that car.
Tim: The track capability of that car was absolutely astounding. If you think about what it was—I mean, it was an analog car with a manual transmission, and it could hold its own against anything in the world. Technology doesn’t matter. I mean, it was just that good. But it had its downsides. I mean, let’s be honest. I own one, so I’m allowed to bash it. If you don’t own one, you can’t because we’ll fight. But if you own one, you can bash it.
There’s things wrong with it, right? I mean, when they came out with the new rule for ejection mitigation, we had to discontinue the car because you would have to put airbags right over you—as a driver, right over your ear. And you sat in the car. It’d be impossible.
Joel: It’s right next to your head.
Tim: Yeah, you couldn’t do it. It’s impossible. So you know, we had to get rid of the car, and honestly, in today’s day and age, it would have needed to become an automatic or a dual-clutch or something like that. It reached the end of its life cycle. As much as it pains me to say that, it reached the end of its life cycle.
Joel: Fair enough. Let’s talk about Scrambler. You guys showed a 392 powered Gladiator today. We talked about Wrangler refresh and Gladiator refresh and all these things. We talked about the rear seats swiveling in this Scrambler. How—talk to me about how the rear seats will be able to face forward and back, or not at the same time of course, but how does that work?
Tim: It’s really well done. We did not show you a 392 Gladiator today. Ralph was doing a walk-around and Ralph transitioned from the Wrangler—I was standing right there—he transitioned from the Wrangler 392 to the Gladiator and he said, “with the 392.” It was not disclosed, it was not written, it was not in any way. Did he just say it? I don’t know. Was it a mistake? I don’t know. But we did not announce a 392 Gladiator today.
Joel: So I heard 392 Gladiator, but let’s go back to Scrambler rear seats.
Tim: Scrambler. Now, Scrambler is freaking cool. Because if you—look, nobody can see it, we’re not going to show pictures of it—but what’s exciting about Scrambler is if you can just close your eyes for a second and envision a Gladiator. And you envision the Gladiator and you see a very military side profile and you see a very low beltline and a high greenhouse, right? Where the glass is versus where the body is. And you see almost equal proportions between the side of the body and the glass.
That’s awesome, that’s very purposeful, it’s very military. As soon as you see it, you may not even be able to articulate it, but it just says “purposeful,” that was designed for that. On the Scrambler, we went in the other direction. On the Scrambler, we said we want to have something that conveys muscularity at the same time fun—not that military purpose-built thing, because we’ve been doing that forever. We have that. So why add another one of those if you already have that? I mean, how many different flavors of the ice cream can you make, you know?
So we said, okay, here’s what we’re going to do on this one: is we’re going to make the sides much more muscular instead of purposeful, and we’re going to raise the beltline significantly to lower the greenhouse. What happens with that when you do that, the visual side proportions change dramatically and you see a completely different car, even though underneath that it is still a four-door Wrangler.
But the proportions change. Now, what that enables you to do when you do that is we take the front door, and instead of having four doors, we make the front door significantly larger. Just like you would do with a two-door Charger and a four-door Charger, right? So the front door then becomes significantly larger, you open the front door, you can get into the front seat, but you also have pretty easy ingress/egress to the back seat, just like you would in the old days to a regular two-door car.
But the back—I’ll call it the back cap, if you will—if you were thinking about a pickup truck, you know, the camper cap—the cap can then come off like an old K5 Blazer. That can come off and you have the seats in the back that sit at the normal position of the front seats. So while you’re in the thing—while you’re in the vehicle—it almost seems like you’re in a four-door Wrangler.
But since the top comes off, we’ve enabled the rear seats to be removable and flippable so that you can make them facing backwards. That’s why we put the step on the side, so you can literally walk up to the side of this thing, don’t open the door, step on the step, jump in the back, and sit in the seat. That’s cool, but that’s not really what the total purpose was. What the total purpose was is when you take the top off and you have that seat back there, you can then fold that seat backwards flat and it makes a bed floor like a truck. When you do that and the top’s off, you actually have a bigger bed back there than a Gladiator.
Joel: It’s longer because the bed in a Gladiator is a short bed.
Tim: Yeah, you literally end up with a Swiss Army knife. It’s a super cool concept.
Joel: And I think someone was talking to me that this was like a—something along the lines of a “love letter to enthusiasts,” I think was the line that was used today for this thing. Is that how you would describe it?
Tim: We have been doing Moab concepts for Easter Jeep Safari for—I don’t even know how many years and I don’t even know how many millions of dollars we spend on these things—and we come up with all these amazing things, and we learn a lot, and we take some of that learning and we put it into our current cars.
What we haven’t done, though, is take all of those ideas that people say—instead of saying “Oh, they like this, this, and this” and putting on a current car—we said, “Well, why don’t we just take all the stuff that they like and make an actual car?” So that car is kind of the Silly Putty mashup of a lot of the things that people said that they liked.
Joel: Got it. I got a question about Jeep, just pivoting here completely. Jeep Wrangler, you guys obviously have leaned in, we talked a little today. Ralph talked about the designs and the 12 months of Jeep with different drops every month, and then some of those if they’re very popular they will go into production and others will be like, “well, we’ll do a batch of them and we’ll be done.”
Last year there was a minute—there was a minute where Bronco was nipping at the heels of Wrangler, and then—and then Wrangler pulled ahead and Wrangler sold out from Bronco. And then this year we started off strong again with Bronco and Wrangler going head-to-head. I’m curious for Jeep, who do you see as a holistic brand for Jeep—not just Wrangler, but I was mentioning the Bronco rivalry—but as a brand, who do you see as the main competitor for the brand of Jeep? Because it’s a very unique brand, and today I heard, “we may have lost our way, we’re refocusing and we’re doubling down, we own this segment,” is a message I heard loud and clear.
Tim: We consider Jeep to be two cars. And you may say, “Oh, you got five, you got six, you got seven, in the plan you got eight”—no, we consider it to be two cars. We consider it to be “legendary off-road” and “legendary lifestyle.” The off-road is what we call the family of Wranglers. You got a Wrangler, you got a Wrangler Unlimited (the four-door), you got a Wrangler Gladiator, and someday you’ll have a Wrangler Scrambler. That is our legendary off-road line.
And then the lifestyle line would then be all of the other ones: the Recon, the Compass, the Cherokee. They still have to be Jeeps, but they don’t need to be Trail Rated 12 like a Wrangler. They still need to be extremely capable, but a little bit different than what we’re doing with the Wrangler. The reason that we do that and the reason that we’re very focused on that is that we say, “I don’t care what your research says about Jeep buyers, 100% of Jeep buyers take their vehicle off-road.”
And when I say that, every journalist looks at me and they’re like, “That’s crazy, I’ve seen the data, no, no, no, they don’t do that, nobody with a Wagoneer goes offline, blah, blah, blah,” right? Yeah, 100% of them, though, think they can. That’s the whole point. It’s an enabling of that spirit of “I love the outdoors, I love the idea of being able to do this,” whether I actually do it or not.
So who’s the main competitor? I don’t actually see a main competitor, but I see a lot of people trying to go into that same space. Probably every manufacturer has an off-road trim now, and most of them really have no off-road capability. It’s stickers and, you know, knobby tires and things like that. There’s no real capability. If I look at somebody who I would say I think did a good job carving out their niche and really going after it effectively: Subaru.
Joel: I would agree with that. I mean, Subaru definitely has carved out a niche and the cars are far more capable than most people, to your point, might need in reality. Do you feel that Bronco sales have put in any way the heat on the Wrangler, or not in the little?
Tim: Of course. We were there all by ourselves forever, and some people, you know, bought Wranglers over and over and over again and in a lot of cases it’s not your primary transportation, in a lot of cases it’s people’s secondary cars and things like that. So they want to try something new. Now, there have been people that have gone and bought Broncos and come back. There’s been people that bought Wranglers and left and still drive a Bronco. I mean, that’s good. It’s actually good. I know it sounds crazy for me to say that; competition is good because look what it’s doing to us. 12 for 12, we’re looking at Scrambler. It’s putting the heat under us to innovate even more. And the only one that’s going to win is the consumer.
Joel: I would agree with that statement. What do you think about Rivian? And I ask that because before it’s when you’re selling 40,000 vehicles and they’re all 80 to 130,000 dollars, it’s a whole different segment, right? And really they—they were much larger. But now all of a sudden they’ve got R2, it went into production, they’re about to start deliveries, and they’re at the heart of the market at $45 to $65,000 with the average transaction price hovering around $48, $49. It sounds like it—I mean, it’s the size of a Cherokee, right? And that’s a huge segment. It’s the most important segment in America, arguably in terms of volume. Do you guys see them as a competitor against Cherokee?
Tim: You know, I—I don’t see their financials, right, so I don’t know how, you know, profitable they are at that price point, but you know, we’ll see. Is it a competitor for Cherokee? I don’t know. Everything’s a competitor for a Cherokee. That—that’s a bloodbath segment. There’s so many competitors in there, it’s so price-sensitive. We only have a hybrid. We have aspirations to have something other than hybrid at some point because most other people do, most other people don’t have a hybrid only, but we led with that. Today, you know, with the gas prices, thank God we did, so it—it looks like we were smart on that one. The day we launched it, I don’t know that we were feeling that way, but—
Joel: Five dollars a gallon will make you feel like having a hybrid’s a good deal.
Tim: Pretty damn smart. No, I take that back, actually—I was responsible for that, I took the—yeah, it was my idea.
Joel: No, no, no, you’re just one of the guys that works for Filosa, I heard earlier in the podcast. When you say you have dreams of other—you have interest in other powertrains for that vehicle, can you expand on that?
Tim: What, Cherokee?
Joel: Yeah.
Tim: A traditional ICE.
Joel: Got it. I didn’t know if we were going to have like some Hellcat or—
Tim: No, you—you see, you have this technology and it’s all a matter of: can you recover the cost and then more than the cost? Because if all you can do is recover the cost, what’s the point, right? You’re putting yourself into a small part of the market—
Joel: The profit margin.
Tim: Well, you put yourself into a small part of the market for no gain. If you’re going to put yourself into a small part of the market and you can get a gain, then great, it was a smart decision that you made. It’s no different than Hemi. When we launched the—the Rumble Bee, I made the joke because I didn’t want to overtly say, “Hey, we dropped the mild hybrid on the Hemi” because a lot of people would take that as a very negative comment. So I said, “Hey, it’s only got one battery.” It’s very much a “if you know, you know.”
Because if you didn’t know what I was talking about, you probably would have been insulted by me saying, “Hey, we removed the hybrid.” But if you knew what I was talking about, you’re like, “Hell yeah, that’s a good idea.” But think about what that enables. When we brought the Hemi back, we put it into the light-duty truck, we already had the T6 there, we put the Hemi in it, and we charged 1,200 dollars for the Hemi. Then we take the mild hybrid off—the customer is like, this is the exact opposite of what I was just talking about with Cherokee—we take the mild hybrid off, the customers applaud taking the mild hybrid off, and we now have a tailwind of profitability in that car.
What does that do? If I say, “Oh, that’s great for our bottom line as a company,” the people listening to this podcast are like, “Who cares? I don’t care.” I’ll tell you what it does for the customer, though: it allows me to go deeper into my express trims. I can get deeper into my black expresses with Hemis in them and things like that. So now I can sell you a 50,000-dollar net-of-incentive black express truck with a Hemi, with a mild—or without the mild hybrid system, and the customer’s going to get a huge gain. That’s what it does.
Joel: See, here I thought you were going to try and sell me that’s how you get a Copperhead out the door faster. But what do I know? So Recon today, we heard that it’s going to get an ICE engine, actually heard it multiple times. Next year, BEV first, launch with EV, gets an ICE engine. We saw—we saw it today, which I know people can’t see what we’re talking about, but spoiler: it looks like the Recon with a little more open grille.
Tim: Well, I mean, why would you change it? I think—I think the Recon is a home run design. Hopefully, you never play this back to me after we launch it and you go, “Look, it didn’t work.” I think it will. I think it’s a home run design. But by being battery-electric only with the shift right now that’s going on with consumers—that’s going to limit the potential of it, for sure. I still think it’s going to do well as a battery-electric, all things being considered, but as an ICE, I think this thing’s a home run.
Joel: What engine will be put into that, or what kind of engine will fit in that even?
Tim: Well, we make cars here, so we can make anything fit in it, but we haven’t disclosed yet what’s going to be in it.
Joel: So Hellcat Recon, got it. That’s the SRT version, right?
Tim: Mm.
Joel: It’s still at large. And I—it was originally going to—it’s capable of an EREV, I know that system for that—the Wagoneer S and that platform was capable of an EREV when it was at least announced. So I wasn’t sure if you want to do a Pentastar or if it’d be smarter to do a hybrid from a Cherokee. I don’t know, I’m making things up.
Tim: We’ll see. We’ll see.
Joel: Okay. Let’s move on to Ramcharger. Ramcharger we saw today. You and I have talked about this extensively. It’s going to be a different vehicle than a Wagoneer, based on a Wagoneer.
Tim: You—you loved it, didn’t you?
Joel: I think it’s going to sell well. I think it’s going to sell well.
Tim: You’re hedging there. It’s freaking cool. Come on, admit it.
Joel: It looks—it looks—it looks like you think it looks. It looks like a Wagoneer with the Ram front design—like, it looks like what you think. I actually didn’t see the interior. We were moving real fast today, and Copperhead kind of got me distracted, if I’m honest about it. Scrambler, Copperhead. But—but I do—my question is: I did hear a thing today that was going to separate it as far as engines. I heard that that’s going to be V8, it’s going to have a towing focus, all—like, more “truck-y” things than a Wagoneer, right? A Wagoneer’s that lifestyle choice.
Tim: If you look at that space, that is a—it’s a very good space in our industry. And if you look at it, Ford goes in with two entries: Ford and Lincoln. Two different showrooms. GM goes after it with a Chevy, with a GMC and a Cadillac. Three different showrooms. We have a Wagoneer—we had a Wagoneer and a Grand Wagoneer, now we have just a Grand Wagoneer—in one showroom. When we bring in a second vehicle, it’s going to be in the same showroom.
So our whole intent was: look at what the other guys are doing with multiple versions in different showrooms and see how much we can differentiate these two sitting next to each other so it’s not like, “Hey, that one’s got a Jeep badge on it and that one’s got a Ram badge on it.” They needed to look, feel, and act different. And I know nobody can see this that’s listening to this, but I think when you see them—and we purposely parked them side-by-side—when you see them side-by-side, they look different.
There’s going to be people that are going to look at the Jeep and go, “Oh, hell yeah, that’s the one I want, I don’t want that other one,” and there’s going to be people that look at the Ram and say, “Hell yeah, I want that one, not the other one.” I liken it exactly to Charger and 300 when we had them in the showroom together.
Joel: They were the same car.
Tim: They were the same car, let’s be honest.
Joel: They were different buyers.
Tim: They were absolutely different buyers, and that’s exactly what we’re trying to do with this. We want one to be very focused on who a Ram customer is and one very focused on who a Jeep customer is. And powertrain matters. Our intent is to leave the powertrains as is on the Jeep, as is as in the architecture. That doesn’t mean that we won’t have multiple versions, different power levels, but the architecture. And then the architecture of the Ram would be more V8-based.
Joel: Sure. And I’m glad you—this is a perfect transition. It’s like you know me, you get it. So the slide deck today, which is live for anyone that wants to see, we’ve got photos of it on the website already because we’ve written seven articles already, probably more by the time this goes. There’s SRT versions coming of this. And to your point earlier, SRT’s gotta be sunken cost. It has to be cars that you already have hard points exist, etc. And you mentioned to me earlier today in the design dome, SRT’s not a standalone brand today. It is—it is product based on products. And both the Grand Wagoneer and the Ramcharger on that slide deck today had the little flag indicating they’re getting SRT things.
Tim: And then you’re going to say, “But that one’s a V8 and that one’s not.”
Joel: That’s not what I was going to say, but feel free to keep going down that path. You want to keep going down that path?
Tim: No, go on yours, go on yours.
Joel: Okay, I’ll go on mine. You might forget about mine.
Tim: I don’t think I’ll forget about yours. I don’t forget easy.
Joel: But what I was going to say is that we already know that both these are based on the DT. They’re based on the Ram. And we also know all the engines that just launched—one day ago, I don’t know what day it is anymore. We showed—the Rumble Bee. We’ve got the 5.7, we’ve got the 6.4, and a 6.2 supercharged—like, all these engines fit in these. So how do you A) differentiate SRT versions of those sitting across the lot from each other in terms of powertrain because the design is easy—like, they look different—and B) do they need to be, or is the design enough? Does that make sense?
Tim: Uh, it’s not enough because we have very specific rules for SRT and what they have to be for the powertrain, for the interior, for the suspension, for the user experience. Everything about SRT is very much a gating process. And what we do is we—like, everyone says, “Hey, are you going to build a Pacifica SRT?” No. Because it cannot fulfill the promises of SRT, right?
So we look at all the products in the portfolio or parts of products in the portfolio and we say, “Can this actually deliver an SRT?” Because as soon as you water that down, as soon as you bastardize that name, it doesn’t give you the halo that it’s intended to give you. It doesn’t give you that brand billing. By the way, that’s why it’s not a brand. That’s why it’s not called the SRT brand. It’s a Dodge SRT, a Ram SRT, or a Jeep SRT. It takes what the Jeep brand is, the Dodge brand, or the Ram brand and amplifies it to an extreme level because, as you know, you saw it a million times on Dodge, that halo then trickles down. All we ever used to talk about was SRTs, Hellcats, Demons, Redeyes, all this stuff. The reality is we sell 50% Pentastars. It works, it absolutely works, if you’re very careful and it delivers on those pillars of the SRT brand. Now, what I didn’t tell you was—I said it has to be mission-specific on the powertrain, but I didn’t say that SRT equals V8. I didn’t say that.
Joel: I didn’t say that.
Tim: I know. But you were kind of implying that, like: how do you make a T6-based architecture an SRT and a V8-based architecture an SRT? And I will tell you that you need to hold that thought until Roadkill Nights on our engineering day and we’re going to show you something that’s really freaking cool.
Joel: Okay. So going down on the SRT thing again, I—I don’t remember who it was anymore, honestly, but it was months ago, about a V8 returning to Grand Cherokee. And it was basically said, like, “hold tight.” Like—and the path I went down was because—and I don’t mean a supercharged or anything like that for Trackhawk, I mean a 5.7. The reason—
Tim: It—it doesn’t make sense.
Joel: It doesn’t make sense?
Tim: No, doesn’t make sense. I’m in one showroom with four different brands with four different brand identities. We have a V8-only strategy on Durango. Now, we violate that on a regular basis and build some of them with Pentastars, and we do that because we generally run out of V8s. But our strategy is, once we get enough V8s, the Durango will be V8. It will be 5.7, 6.4, 6.2.
Joel: No V6.
Tim: Period. Once we have availability like that. And those things are working, they’re selling, they’re turning, the strategy’s great. We just run out of V8s and we put the Pentastars in them. Then you look over at the Grand Cherokee and you say, “Okay, why don’t you just put a V8 in that?” No, we have to be focused on: we have four different brand personalities, we have four different brand, you know, customers that we’re trying to attract. The Grand Cherokee should not be the same as a Durango. The V8 Hemi—the Hemi 5.7 V8—should not be in a very highly refined vehicle like the Grand Cherokee.
Can I do more with it than I have today? Absolutely I can, and will we? Absolutely we will. But it doesn’t make sense to do a 5.7 Hemi.
Joel: So the turbo-6 makes sense in the Grand Cherokee?
Tim: Oh, sure it would. It’d be great. I’m not saying that we’re doing it, but it would be great.
Joel: Would you do it?
Tim: I would love to do it. Doesn’t mean I’m going to, but I would love to. There’s a whole bunch of things I’d like to do that I’m not going to do.
Joel: GLH. We saw today.
Tim: We’re probably going to call it the Hornet and the GLH will be the top version of it. We just screwed up on that line that we put there and on the slides we just called it GLH as—just—we were running fast. It—it’ll probably be called the Hornet. And people say, “well, but the other Hornet wasn’t really, you know, that performance-based and yada, yada, yada”—all the things that whoever’s listening to this is going to then scream at, you know, whatever they’re listening to this on. But that’s okay, that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the name. I think the name’s good, I think the name makes sense, and we could still have a GLH on top because we had every intention to make a GLH version of the original Hornet. We just ran out of time.
Joel: So the—the new Hornet—it’s going to be based on—
Tim: I said probably—I didn’t say for sure.
Joel: New potential Hornet that will birth a GLH. Call it whatever you want to call it. Um, there—today we—
Tim: It’s a hatchback, it’s not a crossover too, because I heard some people calling it a crossover. It’s a hatchback. It’s a hot hatch.
Joel: I think that’s—Ralph called it a “fat hot hatch.” I like that. It’s a fat hot hatch.
Tim: Yeah, it’s a fat hatch. I like it.
Joel: I don’t think he called it a fat hatch. I think he called it a fat hot hatch.
Tim: But it is—it is wide, it looks bad ass. But somebody called it a crossover and I was like, “Come on, stop. It’s a fat hatch.”
Joel: The fat hatch. He said it’s on based on Stella-1 and can fit anything all the way up to a Hurricane, or it’s multi-energy platform so it can fit electric, can fit everything like that. Uh, Hurricane—
Tim: Remember old school when you blackout doing the debate? I think Ralph was blacking out, man. He was on a roll today.
Joel: Yeah. Just in the moment. It was in the moment. Does a Hurricane fit under that, or he just—he was just on a roll?
Tim: How you—how you going to make a front-wheel drive Hurricane? The thing would have to be 120 inches wide.
Joel: Well, you do have a Hurricane turbo-4, you have a mini-Hurricane. It’s like a little tornado.
Tim: Okay. All right. You win. All right, all right. Checkmate, you win. All right, all right. Checkmate, you win. All right.
Joel: So turbo-6 won’t fit under that, basically.
Tim: No.
Joel: Okay. Just checking. Even in—even in a GLH?
Tim: A straight-6.?!
Joel: I’m well aware. So no Hellcat.
Tim: It’s this long, if the people could see me, I’m holding the hands as wide as my shoulders.
Joel: It’s like he’s going fishing. It was this long.
Tim: The—the fish was this big. And then I add a transmission, then I add an axle, and then I add hubs and knuckles. I mean, my god. It’s going to be like a three-wheeler with two wheels in the front, it’s going to go—one of those little Can-Am things. It’s going to be one of those.
Joel: It does look cool. I will tell you, it looks cool. It looks cool. Talk to me about the Chrysler the Aero. Where are those going to be built? Because Ralph—Ralph made an interesting comment today. He was like, “This is the epitome of utilization of a global footprint. These are Fiats that we have the licensure but it costs low investment and gets us into that price point of 25 to 35 thousand dollars,” which was an interesting comment. Where are they going to be built for us?
Tim: I—I don’t think we disclosed where they’re going to be built. I mean, it would take you about three seconds with, you know, Google and AI to figure out where we make those for Fiat. But—
Joel: But—but I want to know where ours are going to be built.
Tim: I don’t know. You can Google that and find out where we build the Fiats. Um, but the cars themselves—it’s kind of funny, it kind of goes back to the comment that Liam was making: how can Tim have two sides of his brain? I’m pumped about these little Chryslers. I mean, I’m seriously pumped about these Chryslers because we—we really don’t have anything in our showroom today that is a sub-40,000-dollar car. And I’m not saying that I want a bunch of sub-40,000-dollar car because of the price point. I want them because they attract a buyer that will grow in our showroom. And when I have four brands that I want to feed for the future, if I have a vehicle that I can sell for 25,000 dollars, I can attract customers that don’t even walk into our door today.
I can put them in that car, it’s a fantastic car, and maybe three, four years later, they’ll grow into something else. You see it for years—
Joel: Like a Pacifica.
Tim: Yeah. Well, I can’t believe you just said that because you freaking read my mind. If you look at what’s going on with Honda and Toyota minivans, where are they growing their customers in the Honda and Toyota minivans? They’re growing them from Civics and Corollas and Camrys and then all of a sudden they have the third child and bam, where are they going? Are they going to immediately go to the Chrysler showroom? No, they’re going to go to the showroom that they’re comfortable with that they’ve been in for the last three car purchases.
Joel: So you want to groom all these people to get into a Pacifica.
Tim: Absolutely. Not for a Pacifica—into anything. Into anything.
Joel: What about the other Pacifica variants that we were talking about today?
Tim: Yeah, I said that we were—we were working on other variants. That’s all I said.
Joel: Can we do a Grizzly with 31-inch tires?
Tim: Yeah, that Grizzly’s cool. It is cool. I like the Grizzly. I’m not saying I’m doing it, but I can tell you I like it. And I winked when I said that.
Joel: You know, a couple more questions and then we’ll end because I want to be respectful of your time. I know you’re blowing off a meeting for me right now, which is lovely.
Tim: It actually is.
Joel: I know it is. I’m a fun guy, this is fun.
Tim: And humble too.
Joel: Sometimes. The GLH. We are confirming it’s gas.
Tim: The GL—yeah.
Joel: It’ll be basically a four-cylinder turbo-4 and the GLH version of a Hornet or whatever we’re going to call it, the SRT version, will get a turbo-4 that’s a little pocket rocket.
Tim: Internal combustion little pocket rocket, yeah.
Joel: Turbo-4?
Tim: Internal combustion, little pocket rocket, yes.
Joel: Fair enough. By the way, the Neon SRT-4 was—
Tim: it was bad ass.
Joel: Love that car. Love that car. All right, last question. Talk to me about SRT as a whole. I mean, I know we talk about Pacifica and we were joking about it, but like—we saw a lot of products that are going SRT. What are these pillars—what does it have to be to be an SRT?
Tim: The easiest way to think about it is you have to be able to deliver a product—whatever the donor vehicle was—you have to be able to take that donor vehicle, SRT-ize it, and it generates a—or you come out with a vehicle then that actually helps sell the other vehicles. Let me explain that. So if you take a car—a water bottle—and you say, “I’m going to take a water bottle and I’m going to make it an SRT.”
And when I get done with the water bottle, I make it something that no longer looks like a water bottle, no longer feels like a water bottle, and doesn’t help me sell other water bottles—it doesn’t make sense. In other words, I wouldn’t take a Hornet with an internal—a small internal combustion engine and say, “You know what? I’m going to take that and I’m going to make it rear-wheel drive and I’m going to put a V10 in it and it’s going to be awesome.” It’s totally awesome, but it doesn’t help me. It doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t sell other Hornets. It has to trickle down. If it doesn’t trickle down, it’s not going to work. An SRT Pacifica will not trickle down.
Joel: You know, I have a contractor, and I asked him once “can I do this” and his response was very quick: “for money, I can do anything.” And for money, I do think you could build—wasn’t Ralph Gilles build a 5.7 powered Dodge Caravan or Chrysler Town & Country at one—it was like a one-off car. There was a—I think—I think it got sold.
Tim: He took a Pacifica and he—he slammed it and he put—it was something crazy like 22—it was bad ass. I mean, it looked so cool. But he didn’t—no, he didn’t change the powertrain. No.
Joel: Must be one of those—must be one of those industry rumors.
Tim: Yeah, urban legend.
Joel: Urban legend.
Tim: There was a press conference we did once years ago and somebody stood up—and this was a weird press conference, there was media there and consumers. And a consumer stood up and said, “I really want a Pacifica SRT!” Or no, a Hellcat. “I really want a Pacifica Hellcat! Would you do it?” And I said, “Of course I’m going to do it! Absolutely! Breaking news!” Obviously was joking, right?
Joel: Someone ran a story!
Tim: Oh my god, it became a thing for months! Every once in a while it still comes up to this day. It’s funny.
Joel: So you want to say that you’re going to build an SRT Hellcat Pacifica on the—okay, I’m just checking.
Tim: We’re not going to do—we’re not going to do an SRT Pacifica.
Joel: What a—what a—what a way to really just put a bummer on the ending. Can we put a twist on the ending from that?
Tim: No, let me—yeah, let me twist it for you. We announced today that we’re going to bring eight SRT products over four years across three different brands and—go back in history—that’s the—that is the most aggressive SRT product plan in the history of going all the way back to 1989 when we launched a concept car of the first Viper before it was even called SRT. This is the most aggressive product plan ever. So if you’re an enthusiast and you’re listening to this podcast, that’s the takeaway is: we have, you know, endorsement from the company to use SRT to build our other brands.
Joel: Father the Hellcats is going to give you what you want is what I just heard. Got it. Whatever your definition is of whatever you want, sure. Thank you for your time.
Tim: Thank you.
Joel: That’s it for this week’s episode of the Drivecast. Thanks to Stellantis for opening its doors, to Tim for his time and insight. Thanks to our editor Tyler Murk and thank you for listening. We’ll be back next Wednesday. Be sure to check out thedrive.com for our full coverage of all of this stuff from Stellantis. Subscribe to one of our fine newsletters, they are free by the way. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok and of course subscribe to us on YouTube where we’ve got a lot of cool videos coming up. We’ll see you next week. Bye everyone.