The song says, “Don’t be thinkin’ ’bout what’s not enough … just
be thinkin’ about what we got.”
After the achievements of 2023, the year 2024 turned into one of maintaining the status quo. Given the direction things could have gone, we’ll take what we got in 2024 and hope for growth in 2025.
As the Editorial Board, we worried that the higher costs of production mandated by the UAW’s generous wage settlement of 2023 would come back to hurt Toledo employer Stellantis and price its products out of the market. Sure enough, Jeep Gladiator sales plummeted in 2024, and Stellantis ordered layoffs of more than 1,000 employees.
But then, Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares resigned, the new management reversed the layoffs, and confronted the scary sales trends as a challenge to be overcome, the way a Jeep facing a steep rock wall goes forward rather than back. Stellantis isn’t out of the financial woods, and the future of its pricey product is worrying, but hopeful.