Jeep announces five-year warranty

Jeep Australia has today announced it will increase its new-vehicle warranty from three years to five, at no extra cost to the customer.

Effective today (Feb 24), the "Jeep There & Back Guarantee" also includes free roadside assistance for the entire lifetime of the vehicle if it's serviced at an authorised Jeep dealer.

Aimed at reassuring consumers after a tough couple of years for the brand, which saw a 50 per cent sales slump in 2016, the new five-year, 100,000km warranty is necessary to revitalise confidence says Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Australia CEO, Steve Zanlunghi.

"What you see here today is what Jeep employees will have to live and breathe, because we don't want to go back to 2015 and 2016," he said.

"It's not some silver bullet to salvage sales," insisted Zanlunghi, the New York-born executive who grew up in Melbourne and loves his AFL.

"But Australians want Jeep to back itself. They'd consider Jeep again but they want a few things.

"We did real-world research. We didn't sit in the board room and say 'what can we do?' We talked to people, not just those on the internet either."

"[This] builds the foundations going forward. We're looking for consideration and for customers who may have been burned in the past to give us another chance."

Australia is now the only region in the Jeep world to offer a fully-transferable five-year warranty and the company will also offer the Jeep There & Back Guarantee to owners of 2015 and 2016 Jeep models for $1950. This also adds two years' extra roadside assistance and five years' capped-price servicing.

The company has also altered its servicing regime, with capped-priced service intervals for 2017 Jeeps and beyond now at 15,000km or 12 months (petrol), 20,000km or 12 months (diesel).

Sister company Alfa Romeo has also commenced a new capped-price servicing regime.

Jeep to win back customers with actions, not words

In the Jeep Australia CEO's address to the media, he agreed there was a perception of "poor quality and reliability" around the Jeep brand, which has seen sales nose-dive from a high of around 30,000 annual sales in 2014, to just 12,620 in 2016.

Total Jeep sales in January 2017 were 434 – down from 1268 for the same month in 2016, representing a drop of more than 65 per cent.

The Jeep Grand Cherokee was Australia's most recalled vehicle in 2016 and Zanlunghi admitted "I've heard a lot of people talk about their negative experience.

"[We have a] very humble tone to the public, and we need to be," he added.

"I want to show and prove that we're fixing the back-end and fixing the Jeep brand.

"We have increased the size of our field team, with a big focus on the aftersales team. We streamlined our customer care centre. And we enlarged it by 50 per cent, to make sure problems are solved in a timely manner.

"We got rid of the backlog, we can fix things straight away," he said.

"We improved our 'fixed first time'. It means you want it fixed first time, you don’t want to go back and forth.

He hopes people won't "just go to the internet and complain – we will get on this first.

"We're now able to handle any backlogs and any questions that come in, and with the program you see here we invite customers to give us a chance to fix their vehicles, not just take it to the internet or go out there and say they've got issues without bringing it to us," explained the Jeep Australia boss.

"We're here to help. Sometimes it takes perception time to catch up with reality. We want customers to know we're there for them."

Zanlunghi revealed the "Jeep There & Back Guarantee" is only in phase one. He stated that phase two and three would be rolled out this year and into next year.

"We'll shift to different phases but it'll be the public reaction that will determine which direction we go.

Up from three years, the five-year Jeep warranty matches those of Hyundai, Mitsubishi and, more recently, Skoda.

The only brands that have a longer warranty are Kia with seven years and Citroen with six years.

The five-year new car warranty shows a renewed confidence within the company, says Zanlunghi, who added that fresh SUVs on the way – including the all-new Jeep Compass compact SUV that comes to Australia later in 2017 – will increase interest in the brand and rebuild sales.

An all-new version of the Jeep Grand Cherokee is expected to debut in late 2018. Instead of the current model's dated Mercedes-Benz M-Class platform, it will ride on an all-new platform dubbed Giorgio, which also underpins Alfa Romeo's new Giulia sedan.

Further afield, all-new Jeep models like the big new Wagoneer and extra-large Grand Wagoneer SUVs – which are expected to be based on the next RAM pick-up platform but are yet to be confirmed for right-hand drive – would also help Jeep sales in Australia.