Jeep on the comeback trail
Jeep brand head of Asia-pacific and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Australia president and chief executive Steve Zanlunghi has pointed to significantly lower vehicle buyback rates and falling warranty claims as evidence that its all-important, volume-selling US off-road brand is ready to emerge from the wilderness.
Jeep sales have fallen off a cliff in recent years, from a height of more than 30,000 in 2014 to just 7326 new registrations last year, compounded further this year with a 27.5 percent fall – to 1791 units – after the first four months of trading.
But the senior management team at FCA Australia has not been sitting idle, implementing a wide range of customer-focused initiatives over the past two years – and planning more, including cheaper servicing – to improve relations with current owners and draw more people back to the fold.
New models will arrive to help arrest the decline and take the brand to profitable, and sustainable, higher levels.
Mr Zanlunghi said the number of defective vehicles his company had to
buy back dropped by more than half last year compared with 2017, while warranty claims tumbled by 35 percent over the same period.
These results stem from a number of changes implemented in 2017 designed to improve Jeep’s battered image after a series of widely publicised cases involving dissatisfied customers.
Among the initiatives were warranty and roadside assistance extensions, a doubling of service intervals, to 12 months, improved servicing and better dealer training.
The company has, however, received another setback with the Australasian New Car Assessment Program handing down a disappointing one-star safety rating for the new Wrangler – well below the five-star result that most manufacturers now achieve for their latest vehicles. “We’ve done a lot of things in the background to deliver on that promise,” Mr Zanlunghi said.
“We’ve launched the five-year warranty and lifetime roadside assist, we’ve done a lot of things on our back end as well, we’ve worked with our teams in Detroit and around the globe on the Jeep side – the Compass comes from India and the Renegade from Europe – and we’ve worked with our engineers about the quality of the vehicles we have arriving in Australia.
“Our warranty rates were down significantly last year compared with 2017, and vehicle quality buybacks were down dramatically – a massive percent year-on-year.
“It’s an over-arching thing. We’re also training our network a lot more with our technicians, and that’s been a big focus for us to make sure the vehicles are fixed the first time.
“So, it’s not just one silver bullet, it’s all these different ingredients that is going into the quality of the vehicle, but we are seeing indications we are massively making strides in the marketplace.”