Chrysler to Abandon Value Vans

The parking lots in soccer fields everywhere are about to look very different…

Fiat Chrysler has plans to stop its production for about three months at the Windsor Assembly plant in Ontario, starting from mid-February in order to start manufacturing the Town & Country – which is its next-generation offering.

The next-generation minivan from Chrysler will mark its entry into a more premium territory. There are plans in the Fiat Chrysler camp to stop continuing the production of the Grand Caravan minivan which, since the 1980s, has been a staple in the Dodge lineup. The production will be interrupted in order to prepare the manufacturing of the next-generation Town & Country minivan.

It was last years that FCA made public its plans to stop the production of the Dodge Grand Caravan and only sell the Town & Country which is the next generation offering. When this occurs, FCA will also move away from offering a low-featured model at an unbelievably low cost – as Al Gardner, the Chrysler brand boss, recently declared to Automotive News.

The redesigned Town & Country will be offered at a price tag of about $26,000 and it might go up to $45,000 and higher depending on the features on offer, as Gardner further stated. He also said that FCA would love to sell something to its Dodge Grand customers once again although the price segment is quite difficult to pinpoint and the same is true for all of the competing brands for Chrysler. This price point, known as the American Value Package, begins at $22,390. A perfect synergy of platform, content and technology is hard to achieve at that point.

The next-generation Town & Country minivan will come with an all-wheel drive along with a plug-in hybrid power-train. It is expected to come sometime in 2017 when FCA starts to roll it out from its assembly plant at Windsor, Canada.

Source: Data and information presented on this blog have been sourced from http://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2015/02/chrysler-to-abandon-value-vans.html