Dodge not dead yet

Brands marketed in Australia by the Fiat Chrysler Group are currently being examined by the new management team, and weakest in the herd is Dodge. But its Journey peoplemover (pictured) is "a good earner", so the company will maintain attention on Dodge's development and impact on local sales for 12 more months at least.

"It's worthwhile to keep the Journey alive for this year and next year. Bottom line is, we're selling good volume of that product. To walk away from a model that is selling well, a good earner for our dealers and well received by our customers doesn't make sense," said Fiat Chrysler Group CEO, Clyde Campbell.

Without a strong product portfolio to offer buyers, the group needs to "rationalise the [Dodge] brand," he admitted to motoring.com.au. "But we've got a product that's selling well and we don't want to lose it."

Long term, the Journey is likely to carry a Fiat Freemont badge, suggests Mr Campbell. However the company needs to build its Fiat dealership network before it can begin selling vehicles alongside current offerings or in place of them.

"We're talking to our Fiat network now about how quickly we can roll that out and they're enthusiastic to have it so we're quite confident that towards the end of next year we'll be in that position.

"By that stage, we'll also know for sure if there's hope for more Dodge product here so we'll be in a better position by then to make a better call on Dodge going forward."

That means prospects of Challenger and Charger sitting around until then, he admitted. Same goes for models like Dart and Durango. "We're not considering products that have already been engineered for left-hand drive production and not for right-hand drive.

Vehicles not engineered for left and right-hand drive markets from the outset mean tooling costs for later changeover are prohibitive. "And if we wanted to tool that today, we probably couldn't get production until late next year from a research point-of-view, which would eat into the life cycle of the model.

"Going forward we'll look at every model available from the corporation and investigate a business case but we won't do that for products that are mid-cycle already."

That applies to the group's other brand offerings, like Chrysler 200. "We're looking to take the 200 in its next guise," said Mr Campbell. "We've indicated we want it and we think there's a strong case for us taking it. We're pretty confident that it will come on board.

Meanwhile, the SRT version of the Grand Cherokee is being held up by right-hand drive component supply issues, according to Mr Campbell. The company has a handful of models here already but its official release won't be until September or October, he said.

"On the positive side, that gives us a nice cadence of something substantial to roll out for our dealers and consumers."

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