By Ryan Felton

On a weeknight in mid-August, thousands of Jeep fans flocked to a waterfront park in Brooklyn, N.Y., where an ambitious turnaround campaign was underway. Rapper LL Cool J performed, and Jeep, facing an unsettling sales slump, unveiled the return of its Cherokee sport-utility vehicle that it branded "America's Original Influencer."

The Cherokee is credited with inventing the modern SUV and accounted for one out of every six Jeeps sold in America just before the pandemic, the sort of precious branding power companies dream of.

But in 2023, in what would be a major strategic mistake, Jeep stopped making the Cherokee as part of cost-cutting measures to support the automaker's transition to making more electric vehicles. Sales fell and dealers revolted.

Now Jeep and its parent company Stellantis are trying to mount a comeback.

The "biggest piece of the puzzle" to fixing Jeep's woes is simple: "You start with the Cherokee," said Bob Broderdorf, a company lifer who was put in charge of Jeep earlier this year, in an interview.

Automakers are in the midst of big pivots. After they pushed to electrify their product portfolios for several years, goaded in part by stringent emissions regulations, consumer interest in EVs dramatically fell off. Now, recent policy changes have made American classics like the Cherokee more attractive for car companies to sell.

Midsize SUVs like the Cherokee are the most popular kind of vehicle in the U.S. Not having one factored heavily in the 36% slide in Jeep sales in 2024 from before the pandemic, according to data from industry-research firm Motor Intelligence.

Launched in the 1970s, the Cherokee won accolades from the outset as a sportier update of earlier Jeeps and was aimed at a younger generation. That success persisted over time. After Tom Hanks' character in the 2000 movie "Cast Away" returns home, he's reunited with his vehicle, a Jeep Cherokee.

Jeep stopped marketing the Cherokee model in the U.S. once before, in 2002, and replaced it with the Liberty, but brought it back in 2012 as Jeep's popularity soared and it expanded globally.

Things changed after Stellantis was created in early 2021 through the merger of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and France's PSA Group. Faced with stringent tailpipe emissions standards enacted around the world, Stellantis's then-chief executive Carlos Tavares began cutting costs to prepare the company to make more electric vehicles.

Stellantis kept sticker prices high during the pandemic amid a new-car supply crunch, even after competitors started to dial back prices. It also launched a new branding campaign for Jeep's luxury models. Both moves backfired.

Then in early 2023, Stellantis canned the Cherokee, and this time, it didn't have a replacement.

Nixing the Cherokee wreaked havoc and annoyed U.S. dealers. Between 2020 and 2024, Stellantis's U.S. market share dropped from 12.5% to below 8% after the Cherokee was discontinued.

The dealer outrage bubbled over in a letter that a national group fired off to Tavares in 2024. They argued that higher prices relative to competitors had seriously eroded the company's market share.

"Reintroduce the Jeep Cherokee ASAP," the May 2024 letter said.

By the end of last year, Stellantis realized it needed to change course, and parted ways with Tavares, the CEO who orchestrated the merger. And earlier this year the carmaker assembled a new leadership team, installing Broderdorf as the leader of the Jeep brand. Broderdorf had spent the last two decades leading some of Stellantis's most important North American brands like Dodge and Ram.

For Stellantis, the Jeep turnaround plan is vital, and the Cherokee is a big piece of it. It also plans new luxury Jeep models, and a second EV model later this year.

Since the start of 2025, the company's share price is down 30%, and it reported losses of more than $2.5 billion in the first half of the year. The North American region -- where along with Jeep its main seller is Ram trucks -- has historically contributed a majority of profits. More than 80% of its total retail shipments in the U.S. last year were pickups and larger SUVs, Jeep's bread and butter, according to a company filing.

"I have a great deal of respect for how important this brand is for the company, and the heritage of it and what it means for so many people," Broderdorf said.

Broderdorf's approach to right the ship amounts to getting back to basics for a brand with a devoted fan base: Jeep drivers are known to wave to one another on the road and leave rubber ducks on door handles of other Jeeps. Jeep knows it needs a midsize SUV in its product lineup to boost sales and draw in customers, he said.

So far, Jeep has seen a glimmer of hope: In the second quarter of 2025, Jeep notched a slight 1% sales increase compared with a year earlier.

The new Cherokee, when it goes on sale late this year, will only be offered with a hybrid gas-electric motor.

Dealers think the Cherokee relaunch should help. The loss of a midsize SUV like the Cherokee threw a wrench in long-established patterns of car buying, they say: customers who start out with a more affordable, entry-level model will, over time, move into a larger vehicle of the same brand as life changes occur, such as marriage or the birth of a child.

Without the Cherokee, Jeep customers didn't have a step between the entry-level Compass SUV and the larger Grand Cherokee, which now starts around $37,000 and was much higher during the pandemic.

"It was a big jump to go from Compass to Grand Cherokee," says Steven Wolf, a Houston dealer that sells Stellantis brands, including Jeep. "We didn't have something in between, so we lost a lot of business."

Jeep's decision to make the coming Cherokee a hybrid-only should be a selling point for customers, Wolf says. The vehicle is expected to carry an estimated 500 miles of range on a single tank of gas.

Jeep says the new Cherokee will start at $35,000.

Joseph Yoon, an analyst for car-shopping website Edmunds, says the Cherokee's larger size and hybrid powertrain should make it a competitive model for midsize SUV shoppers looking for something bigger than Jeep's Compass but who don't need a third row like its Grand Cherokee can offer.

"Right now, people want car-based SUVs that can pretend to be rugged, not rugged actual SUVs," he says.

Cheaper sticker prices could help. Jeep brought pricing down across most of the brand's portfolio over the past year. The move has been welcomed by dealers, who complained vehemently throughout 2024 about sticker prices they said made Jeep uncompetitive. Now, its cheapest model, the Compass SUV, starts under $27,000.

Heading into the ever-shifting regulatory environment, Broderdorf believes Jeep should have an edge in part because of Stellantis's newer vehicle platforms, essentially the common structural foundations on which different types of vehicles can be built. The company's platforms were designed to support cars powered by gasoline-only, hybrid models, or all-electric vehicles.

"For us, what's super important is that we remain as flexible as humanly possible," Broderdorf says. "Those are the manufacturers that I think will win."

Write to Ryan Felton at ryan.felton@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 12, 2025 20:00 ET (00:00 GMT)

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