By Luke Ramseth, lramseth@detroitnews.com

Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep and Ram dealers were in open revolt against parent company Stellantis NV for much of last year.

Poor corporate decision-making had tanked sales, the retailers said, while a mishmash of overpriced vehicles piled up on their lots and their profits plummeted to Great Recession-era lows. They sent sharply worded letters and publicly griped that the once-proud company had lost touch with the American consumer.

Much has changed since then. A new CEO, Antonio Filosa, is in charge and based in Auburn Hills, Michigan, not Europe. He’s promised to listen to the U.S. dealer body’s input, unlike former chief Carlos Tavares. The company has adjusted prices and streamlined trim levels, and is launching a series of new and refreshed models that dealers say better align with an American audience that appreciates V-8 engines and hybrids.

The automaker has launched a hiring spree to better support its more than 2,000 U.S. stores in sales, parts and service, and has also pledged to spend more on local advertising.

Stellantis dealers have cheered many of the changes and are finally starting to feel optimistic about the future of their businesses, according to multiple interviews this week.

However, recent sales and market share figures show the company’s turnaround effort remains stuck in first gear.

“There’s a lot of work that needs to be done still — got to get through some bad product, and praying that the R&D comes through,” said Jerry Romano, a Hawaii dealer. “But I think that they’re making the right moves. It’s definitely a better position than it was last year at this time.”

Romano and several other dealers told The Detroit News that their monthly sales are essentially flat from a year ago, though others said they are starting to see growth in recent months. In the third quarter, Stellantis’ overall U.S. sales increased 6%, snapping a series of quarterly declines that stretched back two years; full-year sales will be released in the coming days.

“Sales have been, I don’t want to say stagnant, but year-over-year it’s pretty similar,” said Mark Trudell, general manager at Extreme Dodge Chrysler Jeep Ram in Jackson, Michigan, who added he’s found some momentum in December and is optimistic about 2026. He said corporate communication with dealers has improved, as have the automaker’s vehicle incentive programs.

Stellantis U.S. market share has fallen sharply in recent years — from 12.5% in 2020 to just 7.7% through the first 11 months of this year, according to car-shopping firm Edmunds.com Inc. That’s a lower share than predecessor Chrysler Group plunged to during the Great Recession when the company went through bankruptcy.

Filosa told investors earlier this month that the company’s U.S. market share has improved slightly for the second half of the year, and that the company has “fixed the dealer inventory management issue that was so bad last year.”

The Edmunds data confirms that Stellantis models aren’t usually sitting as long on dealer lots as they did in 2024. But the company’s vehicles still take many more days to sell than the industry average, with Rams and Chryslers moving especially slowly in recent months. In October and November, for example, Ram’s trucks and vans were taking more than twice as long as the industry’s 63-day average to sell, the Edmunds data shows, which is substantially worse than earlier in the year.

Ivan Drury, director of insights at Edmunds, said he expects the automaker’s U.S. turnaround to take several years as it slowly seeks to win back customers that it increasingly lost to competitors over the last half-decade.

“It’s not gonna happen overnight,” he said. “It’s not gonna happen from one or two products, or a few motor swaps, things like that. It’s gonna be incremental. It’s gonna be potentially painful.”

Stellantis executives have acknowledged the recovery will take time but stress they are laying the groundwork and listening to dealer input in a bid to rebuild trust.

After cutting dealer support staff in recent years, the automaker said it has added 200 people to support sales, service and parts field operations across the country. In 2026, it will also reopen physical business centers around the country that support dealers and add a new business center location in Chicago, spokesperson Ann Marie Fortunate said.

The dealer-focused hiring spree is part of a larger push to add about 2,000 positions in areas also including manufacturing, quality and engineering. Much of the hiring focus has been centered on the automaker’s Michigan headquarters, which dealers see as a welcome shift after Tavares had focused on American job cuts and outsourcing.

Fortunate also confirmed that the company will increase its local advertising spending to support dealers in 2026. It recently brought back dealer ad associations, a system where the company pools resources with dealers in certain large markets and makes collective decisions around advertising, incentives and stocking levels. Dealers said the automaker ditched the regional associations years ago as a cost-saving measure, and they view it as a positive sign that the organizations are back.

Mike Bettenhausen, a Chicago-area dealer who heads the company’s national dealer council, said retailers appreciate Filosa’s willingness to try out new strategies to bring more customers into stores. He said dealers “desperately need the traffic.”

Stellantis is launching several new vehicles in the coming months, including the redesigned Jeep Cherokee and gas-powered versions of the Dodge Charger, both of which are shipping to dealer lots now.

Retailers said these vehicles will start to fill glaring holes in the automaker’s lineup, and ideally, they can “provide that much-needed boost to dealer profitability that has been missing for some time,” Bettenhausen said.

Stellantis’ models had become too “vanilla” the last few years, said Randy Dye, who owns a Florida Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep and Ram dealership. “Our cars are not just appliances, they’re fun,” he said, yet the company’s past leadership “took all the fun out.”

Now that’s starting to change — including as Dodge brings back its loud, gas-powered muscle car and as both Ram and Dodge put Hemi V-8s back inside pickups and SUVs: “These are car people running this company now,” Dye said.

“The more we get these cool vehicles into our lineup … that’s a big deal,” said Ralph Mahalak Jr., who owns Stellantis dealerships in Michigan, Ohio and Florida.

He’s instructed his team to heavily promote the new models on social media as they land at his stores. Models like the Charger might not sell in huge numbers, he added, but can bring “some enthusiasm to my showroom.”

One vehicle dealers do anticipate can juice sales: the reintroduced Cherokee, which, for now, is offered solely as a hybrid, part of a wider push into hybrids underway inside Stellantis.

The company ended production of the last generation of the Cherokee about three years ago and didn’t have a replacement, a move that flummoxed dealers, considering the model competes in the best-selling midsize SUV segment.

“Cherokee, Cherokee, Cherokee — I’ve been missing that one, big time,” said Bill Golling, who operates Stellantis stores in Metro Detroit. Under Tavares, he said, “we discontinued too many car lines, too soon. How do you not have a Cherokee for three years?”

Other reinforcements will take longer to arrive. Ram plans to introduce an all-new midsize truck that dealers expect to sell in large numbers, but it won’t be ready until 2027. Jeep is soon releasing an all-electric model called the Recon. Still, the retailers say they are most looking forward to when the brand offers the same boxy off-roading model in a gas-powered variant, which they expect will be more popular; timing for that isn’t yet available.

Drury said he expects it will be a slog for Stellantis to once again approach double-digit market share in the United States — especially at a time when the overall new car market is expected to shrink next year. But it can make some gradual improvements.

“This has been a rough year for them, right?” he said. “But I do think that next year, at least, there’s some light there. There’s at least something to look forward to.”

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By Luke Ramseth, lramseth@detroitnews.com

New car prices didn’t spike after President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs in the spring, as some experts and dealers projected.

But prices on many models are now pushing notably higher — and analysts said carmakers recouping Trump’s higher import costs is a key factor.

Consider a recent analysis that found automakers are implementing more aggressive price increases on 2026 model-year vehicles compared to when 2025s were hitting dealership lots last year.

Cloud Theory, which tracks car inventory on dealer websites across the country, found the average marketed price increase on 2026 models was nearly $2,000, compared to an approximately $400 uptick during last year’s model year changeover. This year, 23 models have at least a $2,000 price hike; last year there were just nine.

“What I think is different this year is you have a lot of cost increases that are $1,000 or $1,500 or more, $2,000 or more,” said Rick Wainschel, Cloud Theory’s vice president of data and analytics, whose analysis looked at 2026 models with at least 2,000 vehicles in inventory.

“I think that’s a big change and a big shift that’s occurred, and it’s hard to point to any other catalyst for that (except for) tariff costs that the OEMs have had to absorb for the last eight months, and will likely have to absorb going forward,” he said.

Any increase comes on top of average car prices that were already hovering around $50,000. Pair that with stubbornly high interest rates, and the average monthly car payment is now $766, according to Edmunds.com Inc., up more than 3% from a year ago. A record share of subprime borrowers has been falling behind on their auto loans this fall.

Yet the huge car sticker price increases tied to tariffs — which analysts originally warned might tally anywhere from an extra $5,000 to $15,000 per vehicle — haven’t come to pass.

Among the reasons: competitive pressures between rival automakers, concern over blowback from Trump, large pre-tariff vehicle inventories that gave companies a lag time before pricing adjustments were needed, as well as policy adjustments that reduced the pain of the tariffs themselves.

Automakers opted to absorb many of the extra costs in the near term.

But if you’re shopping for a new car right now or plan to in the coming months, experts said it is likely tariffs will cost you in one way or another, even if it’s tough to discern exactly how. Automakers haven’t been eager to publicly disclose any connection between tariffs and their pricing adjustments.

Vehicle destination charges — those mandatory fees for transporting the car to the dealership — are rising, revealing one area where automakers “might be trying to make up a little bit of the costs,” said Erin Keating, an executive analyst at Cox Automotive Inc.

There are also signs of automakers pulling features out of certain models in a bid to trim costs while holding the same sticker price, a phenomenon known as shrinkflation. And then there are indications of carmakers offsetting their tariff costs with higher 2026 model-year MSRPs.

“Automakers really held their prices throughout the ’25 model year, and we’re starting to see a bit (of an impact) in ’26,” said Stephanie Brinley, an auto analyst with S&P Global Mobility. “But it’s being wrapped up in different ways, so it’s very difficult to suss out.”

Car companies often adjust pricing on new model-year vehicles, whether due to minor repackaging of features and trim levels, or full overhauls that include new technology and freshened sheet metal. Brinley said that means there’s no clear way for consumers to figure out where those extra tariff costs might’ve been tacked on.

Keating agrees the tariff impacts have been hard to pin down. Average car prices have been rising steadily much of this year — with September reaching an all-time high above $50,000 — but she said some of that uptick would have been expected anyway because of normal inflation.

The analyst now feels confident those initial shocking projections of price hikes in the 10% to 15% range aren’t going to happen: “The market just won’t bear it,” she said.

Automakers appear to be settling into their new normal under Trump. They’ve secured at least some tariff relief on parts and vehicles imported from certain countries, while simultaneously feeling the benefits of Trump’s moves to loosen federal vehicle emissions and fuel economy standards.

A September J.P. Morgan report estimated combined tariff costs on vehicles and parts will amount to $41 billion in the first year, rising to $45 billion in year two and $52 billion in year three.

The bank expects automakers and consumers to ultimately share the burden equally, which could lead to a 3% increase in new vehicle prices: “This will hit consumers hard,” the report said, “especially as many are already struggling to afford new vehicles.”

Wainschel, the Cloud Theory analyst, said average prices listed on dealer websites have only increased a few hundred dollars per vehicle since the tariffs took effect in early April. But that’s because automakers have pushed an increasing number of affordable models and trims into the market, which has helped hold the overall average price down.

If the current mix of vehicle types listed for sale was the same as it was back in April, Wainschel said, average prices would, in fact, look approximately $1,300 higher now: “So there are some things that are masking the increases that are taking place, the segment mix being a big part of it.”

Brendan Harrington, president of Autobahn Fort Worth in Texas, which sells Porsche, BMW, Mini, Volvo, Volkswagen, Jaguar and Land Rover brands, said big price hikes didn’t occur early on as companies fretted over losing market share.

But now, carmakers are beginning to make larger changes in response to tariffs, he said, including trimming back slower-selling models and increasing MSRPs where they can. He said Porsche and Land Rover are two examples of brands that have upped prices in response to tariffs.

And carmakers are also passing through higher destination charges, he said — increases that are adding $200 to $300 to the cost of a car. Tariffs also are contributing to steadily rising costs for Harrington’s parts and service departments.

“Until now, every OEM has really tried to hold the line,” he said. “But we are seeing prices now come up.”

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By Breana Noble

MediaNews Group

Ford Motor Co. is opening the doors of its new world headquarters to the public on Nov. 16.

Attendees must register online for free to enjoy the festivities that include self-guided tours, a car show, live entertainment, food trucks and other activities for families from 11 a.m. until 4:30 p.m.

The Dearborn automaker last month announced it was moving its headquarters across town to the new, enormous, glassy product development center known as “The Hub” off Oakwood Boulevard across from the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation. It’ll serve as the home for the company that first made vehicles accessible to the masses as it pursues a future toward greater electrification, autonomous driving and other advanced technologies.

The new headquarters will get the 1 American Road address that has marked the location of the Glass House at Michigan Avenue and Southfield Road that has served as Ford’s headquarters since 1956. That building will be demolished and is expected to be turned into a park-like community space in partnership with the city.

On Nov. 16, a grand opening ceremony will occur at noon and a closing ceremony at 4 p.m. Guests can make reservations to see the inside of the building, including workspaces and employee wellness areas. The walking, self-guided look likely will take 15 to 30 minutes, according to Ford.

Guests still can register to attend, even if tour reservations become fully booked. The Ford Community Car Show will show privately owned Ford classics from custom designs and sports models to heavy-duty trucks.

For now, The Hub is listed at 2100 Carroll Shelby Way on Google Maps. Ford’s invitation encourages guests to enter at Village Road and South Pond. Parking is at Deck 300 at 21324 S. Military St. and the PDC lot at 21000 S. Military.