By Eric Peters
The headline of this article is the mea culpa of Tim Kuniskis, the back-again Stellantis executive who formerly was in charge of Dodge and is now in charge of Ram. Both Dodge and Ram are brands owned by Stellantis, the European combine.
Kuniskis left Dodge around the same time Dodge left its buyer base – by cancelling the popular Charger and Challenger and replacing both with a battery-powered device that requires charging. It has not gone well for Dodge since then. Nor for Ram – which had a hot-selling truck until it was decided to replace the V8 with a turbo-hybridized six. It has not sold well since then – and that is why Kuniskis is back. He is seen as the guy who turned Dodge into the go-to brand for buyers who wanted engines rather than devices and – more than that – big V8 engines, because it was the only brand still offering them before management decided to stop offering them.
But it wasn’t because Stellantis had gone “woke” – as the New York Post put it. It was because Stellantis was going broke paying Elon Musk (via Tesla) for carbon credits to offset the “carbon footprint” of its V8-powered offerings. The sums involved were so enormous – in the hundreds of millions of dollars – that it had to offset the losses by increasing the prices of models such as the Charger and Challenger and Ram trucks and Jeeps equipped with V8 engines. This made them harder to sell because they became more expensive than many of the people who’d have loved to by one could afford to spend.
Also less profitable.
This is why then-Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares decided it made more sense to stop offering V8s, in order to stop having to pay Elon. The fly in the soup was most people had no interest in what Stellantis wanted to sell them, especially as regards the Dodge Charger device and Ram trucks with small sixes rather than big eights. It was a textbook study case of not knowing one’s market. More finely, of believing the market – its buyer base – was malleable. That bueyers could be sold anything – so long as the badge said Dodge or Ram.
It didn’t pan out. See New Coke.
See Bud Light.
“When Ram made the decision to discontinue production of the iconic HEMI V8, the internet erupted, and lifelong loyalists voiced their outrage across social media,” admits Lindsay Fifelski, who is head of Ram brand advertising.
“We own it. We got it wrong. And we’re fixing it,” Kuniskis said. Well, sort of. The V8 is coming back – and the Charger will, apparently, be turned back into a muscle car rather than a device made to look like one (and emit the fake sounds of one). The Ram 1500 will once again be available with a V8 as well.
But none of this addresses the carbon credit problem. Dodge and Ram – which is to say, Stellantis – will once again have to deal with the costs incurred on account of having a larger-than-allowed carbon footprint, on account of offering big V8s and fewer devices. Because the regs have not been repealed.
President Trump recently signed a decree “ending” the EV sales mandate California imposed – and which a number of other states have mirrored. But all that means is that CA and other states can’t (for the moment, or the duration of Trump’s presidency) force car dealers to stock nothing except EVs. They are now free to sell what sells, which is great. But what no one in the car press has explained, as far as I can tell, is that Trump has not touched the federal regs that act as a de facto EV manufacturing mandate – because only EVs can comply with the regs pertaining to fleet fuel economy averages (CAFE) and regs pertaining to the lowering of CO2 “emissions.” The latter word is placed within air quotes because it is purposefully dishonest to refer to CO2 – which does not cause or worsen pollution – as an “emission.” It is an etymological trick to conflate these two things in the mind of the average person, who does not know better because they do not want him to know better.
And we all know who they are, don’t we?
In case you don’t, it is the aggregate of malicious regulators – such as the former head of the EPA, Michael Regan – and rent-seeking grifters, such as Elon Musk. The latter has extorted billions from legitimate companies such as Stellantis via the carbon credits scam that effectively forces them to buy these credits as the price of regulatory compliance. Their choice is either to pay Elon – via his Tesla grift – or lose even more money by wasting it on the development of their own, in-house devices that comply with the regs pertaining to “zero emissions” vehicles.
But there was – and still is – another choice. It is to publicly call Musk and the carbon credits scam out and to stop complying. Instead of spending hundreds of millions on carbon credits, spend a fraction of that on a media juggernaut – perhaps starring Kuniskis – explaining to the people just exactly how the carbon credits grift works and what it is costing them, in terms of diminishing choices, smaller engines – or no engines at all – and much higher sticker prices for the kinds of vehicles they’d like to buy but which certain elements are determined to prevent them from being able to buy.
This would require more than just money. It would require some balls. Maybe Kuniskis has a pair.
We’ll soon see.
