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It's official: Stellantis begins production of RHD Wranglers in India to ease delivery times for the RHD vehicles.

631_Islander

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https://www.carandbike.com/news/202...ndia-launch-soon-2376684?pfrom=home-ndtv_auto

This will help our fellas in RHD countries get their hands on a JL Wrangler quicker as the current lead time for a RHD Jeep is much longer than a LHD since an outside agency is needed to do a conversion.

Good news for those of us who live in the UK, Australia, India, Singapore, Malaysia or HK (or any place where RHD is the norm).
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aldo98229

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Bad news for Toledo workers, though.

Just wait for Stellantis to figure out that those Wranglers cost 30% less to build...and come out with fewer quality problems...
 
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Bad news for Toledo workers, though.

Just wait for Stellantis to figure out that those Wranglers cost 30% less to build...and come out with fewer quality problems...
Seems like FCA wanted to have the RHD models built outside of Toledo for many years now but they needed financial justification. Guess they finally got one as the Wrangler's current share in India is under 5% due to pricing issues. With India being a huge automotive market, they probably want to increase that share. It may help the Toldeo workers in the long term as that factory strongly prefers to focus only on LHD. Might be a win win for both the RHD countries and for the Toledo workers. Doubt FCA will outsource their LHD wrangler production anywhere else. India has historically been very bad with LHD production based on my experience of dealing with co workers who live in India and call on Tier 1 Automotive customers.

It is probably very bad news for the outside agency they were using that was converting the LHD models to RHD.
 

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Seems like FCA wanted to have the RHD models built outside of Toledo for many years now but they needed financial justification. Guess they finally got one as the Wrangler's current share in India is under 5% due to pricing issues. With India being a huge automotive market, they probably want to increase that share. It may help the Toldeo workers in the long term as that factory strongly prefers to focus only on LHD. Might be a win win for both the RHD countries and for the Toledo workers. Doubt FCA will outsource their LHD wrangler production anywhere else. India has historically been very bad with LHD production based on my experience of dealing with co workers who live in India and call on Tier 1 Automotive customers.

It is probably very bad news for the outside agency they were using that was converting the LHD models to RHD.
Keeping Wrangler production in Toledo was supposed to be as sacred as keeping Alfa Romeo production in Italy.

That is, of course, until it isn’t sacred any longer...
 

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This looks like it is just for the indian market and instead of having complete units shipped they will be assembled in India, don't really see how this will improve lead time as the RHD kit will still need to be manufactured in the US just cheaper as it is shipped in knocked down form, assembled in india and attracts less tax due to this. I don't think it will make any difference to us in Australia in regard to wait times at the moment....
 

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631_Islander

631_Islander

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Keeping Wrangler production in Toledo was supposed to be as sacred as keeping Alfa Romeo production in Italy.

That is, of course, until it isn’t sacred any longer...
Of course! Stellantis comes over and typical of a big company they only care about two things: profitability and time to market. This move to India may hurt their profitability short term as they will have to get their ROI on the Machinery that had to be bought but will do wonders to their time to market for RHD wranglers. Unfortunately all this will be coming at the expense for that agency that was converting LHD Wranglers to RHD. Hate to tell you it is not the first time a major Automotive manufacturer has looked East and probably will not be the last time either.

I work in the Electronics Industry and a colleague of mine calls on FCA out of our Detroit area office (the Tier 1 Automotive Sales Office of ours). I asked her about this today. She said this was years in the making and FCA had to discuss this a lot with the worker's Union internally. Supposedly, the Union and many workers agreed over time that this shift of RHD to India is a good thing as the outside agency was notorious for having quality issues and would get delayed a lot. In addition, many workers had to do crazy hours as the demand for the JL had significantly exceeded expectations. She was informed of this decision about four months ago and requested to keep it confidential to her and her management only back then. She then got her India office counterparts involved relatively quickly in order to have them forge a relationship with FCA.

FCA also needed a partner to team up with in India. They chose Tata as FCA had a nasty falling out with their traditional Indian partner recently (Mahindra; a competitor of Tata).
 
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631_Islander

631_Islander

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This looks like it is just for the indian market and instead of having complete units shipped they will be assembled in India, don't really see how this will improve lead time as the RHD kit will still need to be manufactured in the US just cheaper as it is shipped in knocked down form, assembled in india and attracts less tax due to this. I don't think it will make any difference to us in Australia in regard to wait times at the moment....
I don't know. Let us see where this goes honestly.
 

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Interesting that the UAW agreed.

The brand-new Toledo plant cranking out JLs has a capacity for 300,000 units/year, but it is producing only 2/3 of that. Same thing with the old JK plant updated for Gladiator: it has a 200,000 unit capacity currently running at 80,000 JTs.

FCA is sitting on 500,000 units of combined JL + JT producing less than 300,000 units a year. Now there is more production being added overseas.

So much for Marchionne's infamous fixation with capacity utilization.
 
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631_Islander

631_Islander

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Interesting that the UAW agreed.

The brand-new Toledo plant cranking out JLs has a capacity for 300,000 units/year, but it is producing only 2/3 of that. Same thing with the old JK plant updated for Gladiator: it has a 200,000 unit capacity currently running at 80,000 JTs.

FCA is sitting on 500,000 units of combined JL + JT producing less than 300,000 units a year. Now there is more production being added overseas.

So much for Marchionne's infamous fixation with capacity utilization.
What can we say, lol? When the numbers are in the grey and we have new management at the helm the rule book gets played with. An accountant can always play with the numbers legally in order to help upper management make their case. The time to market for the RHD Wrangler seems to be the biggest reason here alongside the perceived quality issues with the outside agency. Will be interesting to see how this will help Stellantis over the years and whether they BS'd their suppliers also. Pretty sure they may save some $$$ also and make the Wrangler competitive for the India market. As of today, a JLUR with a 2 Liter Engine starts near USD 100k in India due to Indian tax and duty laws for overseas exports.
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