Chrysler has sold many passenger cars over the decades, but ever since discontinuing the moderately iconic 300 several years ago, the brand has dealt solely in minivans. That could be about to change, however. According to CEO Chris Feuell, a not-minivan and perhaps non-crossover is a-coming. From Automotive News:
[T]he lineup will expand with a car that takes cues from the futuristic Halcyon concept shown in 2024. It will offer “multienergy, incredible design and performance, but also interior flexibility and versatility,” [Feuell] said. Feuell believes there’s going to be “a resurgence of the car segment as customers are looking for not only more affordable solutions, but as we’re getting more creative and innovative with how we define a car.”
That is a rather cryptic pronouncement, but it does set the stage for a more serious move toward giving Chrysler some additional models. Not that the Pacifica is doing poorly — it sold more than 32,000 units in the first quarter of 2025 and almost 18,000 in the second. The Chrysler Voyager, the brand’s entry-level minivan that’s just a rebadged Pacifica and used to be fleet-only, sold over 5,000 units in Q2, more than doubling its Q1 numbers. If the Halcyon concept did get you lusting for a cooler Chrysler, however, the news is welcome.
Cars have gotten scarce
By “cars” we mean mainly sedans. These onetime stalwarts of the American roadways have been going extinct among the Detroit Big Three for a while now: Ford dispensed with them entirely, GM has been dropping them, and former FCA (now Stellantis) CEO Sergio Marchionne got the ball of demise rolling back in 2016 when he ended several sedan programs so that he could focus on Jeep and Ram. Marchionne was the ultimate realist. I recall a press conference at the Detroit Auto Show from this time period, when he said sedans were wrong for FCA but lauded the likes of Toyota and Honda for being able to make them work. (Marchionne died in 2018.)
With Fiat Chrysler Automobiles routinely shortened to FCA and then morphed into Stellantis, the good old Chrysler nameplate has been easy to forget about. Staying in the minivan game obviously retained sales but didn’t exactly generate thrills. But the brand has some flexibility. Jeep is Jeep, Dodge is Dodge, Ram is certainly Ram. Chrysler, so far removed from its days as number three among the Big Three, is the logical semi-blank slate onto which some fresh, 21st-century history could be written.
That said, the U.S. market has at least in part rejected the sedan, and in any case Detroit struggled to achieve steady profitability in the segment. Marchionne looked prescient when his competitors followed his example. And Feuell might be thinking less of a traditional sedan model and more of segment-redefining mashup. A low-slung GT or four-door fastback or some such concoction with a radical interior layout and, as the Halcyon concept suggested, augmented reality systems. We shall see. After all, the name does evoke the glories of the past.
