TOKYO — Jeep boss Christian Meunier says his mission is to additional globalize the long-lasting off-road firm and remodel its picture into that of the “greenest SUV model” on this planet.
The technique will contain leveraging synergies with PSA Group and selling Jeep’s upcoming vary of electrified automobiles, partly by a brand new advertising and marketing marketing campaign.
Talking with journalists in Tokyo by videoconference final month, Meunier highlighted Jeep’s fast worldwide enlargement on the again of brisk gross sales in markets comparable to Japan.
Jeep’s worldwide gross sales grew fivefold prior to now decade, from simply 300,000 automobiles in 2009 to round 1.5 million in 2019, he famous. Gross sales in Japan, Jeep’s ninth-largest market, notched a tenfold enhance over that interval. Japan is now the highest purchaser of Wranglers exterior North America.
Jeep used to have simply 4 meeting vegetation, all within the U.S. Now, it has 10 in six international locations.
“There are a lot of various factors that made the expansion potential,” Meunier mentioned. “However I’d say there’s been loads of funding to globalize the model.”
Wanting forward, Meunier mentioned he needs to proceed that momentum partly by tapping advantages from the upcoming merger between PSA and Jeep father or mother firm Fiat Chrysler Cars. He declined to offer particulars concerning the synergies he envisions, however he mentioned there will probably be loads.
“It’s totally clear that Jeep will profit so much from the merger,” he mentioned.
“There’s clearly loads of potential between platform, drivetrain, price discount and issues like that. There’s loads of potential alternatives of synergies and manufacturing footprint.”
Jeep will more and more pitch itself as a imply, inexperienced machine, particularly on the worldwide market, the place automakers should meet extra stringent emissions laws. This 12 months, Jeep launched the Renegade 4xe plug-in hybrid in Europe and Japan as a part of a plan that additionally consists of the electrification of the Compass and Wrangler.
However the shift shouldn’t be solely about compliance, Meunier mentioned. Jeep can also be touting the excessive torque of its electrified choices in a efficiency play.
The Wrangler 4xe proved its metallic in a check drive traversing the demanding Rubicon Path, a 4×4 mecca in California’s Sierra Nevada vary. It drove the entire route in full-electric mode.
Furthermore, entrepreneurs hope Jeep- loving outdoorsy varieties will like driving in silence by nature.
“What’s most necessary is to make our product probably the most succesful and most fun Jeep ever,” Meunier mentioned. “Further torque, driving in silence, with further distinctive acceleration and torque — that is the right match. Jeep and electrification are supposed to be collectively.
“Our ambition is to turn out to be the greenest SUV model on this planet.”
Jeep will attempt promoting that picture by promoting alongside the traces of a spot that has been launched in Europe to tout the advantages of electrification within the Renegade and Compass, he mentioned. It encompasses a red-breasted songbird warbling over scenes of a Jeep driving in silence by a metropolis.
One other YouTube pitch, referred to as “Pale Blue Dot,” options scientist Carl Sagan waxing dramatic about the necessity to defend the setting of planet Earth, “the one residence we have ever recognized.”