Once upon a time, Jeep used the Grand Cherokee as a platform for some pretty surprising vehicles. At the top of the list was undoubtedly the SRT and Trackhawk variants, bringing high-performance on-road SUVs to the brand at a time when, particularly in the model’s early days, that was still a rare thing. The current Grand Cherokee has been on the market for five years already, so many might’ve lost hope that these sports-car-bullying family haulers would ever return. But with new leadership across Stellantis and a renewed commitment to V8s, they’re officially back “on the table.”
We asked Mauricio Lopez, Jeep’s vice president of sales, about the chances of a high-performance Grand Cherokee in the vein of the Trackhawk and possibly with a Hellcat V8 returning to the lineup, especially given that SRT has been fully resurrected. His answer may not have been direct, but it was encouraging.
“I mean, absolutely everything is on the table,” Lopez told The Drive. “There are a lot of things being developed, but Stellantis announced a $13 billion investment in the future of the company. With that, I can tell you there’s a lot of product actions coming that, of course, we cannot announce at this point.”
Lopez then name-dropped Tim Kuniskis, who not only helms Ram but also the SRT brand these days. “Having Tim Kuniskis as the head of this, you can imagine what is coming also from a powertrain perspective,” he added.
This naturally led us to ask if the 6.2-liter Hellcat motor will fit in the WL-generation Grand Cherokee, as it fit in the prior WK2. That wasn’t something Lopez and company were willing to answer at this time, but that alone shouldn’t cause you to lose hope. Earlier this week, we reported that Jeep is asking customers to “stay tuned” for the 5.7-liter V8’s return to the nameplate.
The Stellantis of 2026 looks very different from the Stellantis of 2024. Some of that can be chalked up to personnel changes; some of that certainly to regulatory changes, too. “One of the things that’s encouraging is that with the change in leadership, you know, V8s are no longer a bad word around the company,” Dodge CEO Matt McAlear told us last February, in response to a question about the Charger getting its Hemi back.
If you’re excited by the prospect of a new Trackhawk, the WL Grand Cherokee arguably launched at the worst time, in the throes of the pandemic fallout and a Carlos Tavares-led Stellantis pushing away V8s and embracing EVs. That’s why, five years into this generation, the most exciting Grand Cherokee variants could still be yet to come.
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