Can Antonio Filosa Set Up Chrysler For a Second Century?

By Sam Abuelsamid

Six months after Carlos Tavares was fired, Stellantis finally has a new CEO, 25-year company veteran Antonio Filosa. For the past year, Filosa has served as Stellantis’ chief operating officer for the Americas region and was considered a leading candidate after being appointed to the interim executive committee managing the company since Tavares’ departure. While Filosa may well be a good fit to run Stellantis for the moment, the big question is: Can he set up the company’s brands to thrive once again, especially in the lucrative North American market? In the long haul?

Filosa has many challenges ahead of him, not the least of which is revitalizing sales and improving quality, especially here in North America. There are certainly near-term actions that he can take to help improve the immediate situation. But can he transform the company in a lasting way that helps to avoid the next crisis and convince North American dealers of the same?

One key reason Stellantis was formed by the early 2021 merger of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) and PSA Group was FCA’s North American operations. PSA last sold cars in North America in the early 1990s. As CEO of PSA, Tavares wanted to get back into this second-largest global market after China. FCA’s North American operations were based on what was once known as the Chrysler Corporation and currently consist of Chrysler, Dodge, Ram, Jeep, and vestigial remnants of Fiat. 

Chrysler had a small presence at this year’s New York Auto Show to kick off the centennial celebration of the once proud brand. Today, the Chrysler lineup consists solely of minivans sold under the Pacifica and Voyager nameplates. Everything else has been discontinued, although several new models have been promised and delayed for several years. 

Boom and Bust and Boom and Bust…

For nearly half its history, Chrysler oscillated from the brink of (or, in 2009, actual) bankruptcy to raging success and then back again. In the late 1970s, Lee Iacocca took over and secured loans that the federal government co-signed to keep the company solvent. Chrysler went on to massive success with a range of products almost exclusively derived from the lowly K-car that helped Chrysler get back on track from 1980 onward. This success enabled Chrysler to acquire the wavering American Motors and its Jeep brand in 1987, along with Lamborghini and business jet maker Gulfstream. 

1982 Plymouth Reliant “K-car”

1982 Plymouth Reliant "K-car"

However, within a decade after the K-car, building almost everything on the cheap from this simple platform ran out of steam, and another reset was needed. With Bob Lutz leading another product renaissance in the mid-1990s, Chrysler again became profitable and desirable enough that Daimler-Benz wanted the company, leading to the infamous “merger of equals” in 1998. Daimler Chrysler began coasting on the profits of Jeep SUVs and Dodge trucks, but product programs were again starved of resources, products were neglected, and quality suffered. 

By 2007, Daimler effectively gave away what was left of Chrysler to a private equity firm, Cerberus. Cerberus appointed a CEO from Home Depot who knew nothing of the auto industry, just in time for the 2008 financial crisis. After multiple flirtations, Chrysler Group finally filed for bankruptcy in 2009. The remains of America’s third-largest automaker were picked up for effectively nothing by Fiat and its CEO, Sergio Marchionne. 

After an initial surge of investment that led to much-improved products and higher quality, the profits returned within a few years. But as the 2010s wore on, the cycle was again repeating itself, products were aging, and the company had no viable plan for dealing with a future of electrification, software, and automated driving. Following Marchionne’s death in 2018, a search for a partner began to pick up steam, bringing us to Stellantis. 

A New Path

Our research at Telemetry involves looking at the broader ecosystem of transportation and mobility and how it’s likely to evolve over the next decade and beyond. That requires thinking about much more than results from the quarter that just ended and the one that’s coming up. It’s about examining why and figuring out how best to deal with it to be successful. 

Total Stellantis sales in North America have declined more than 26%, and sales for Ram trucks and Jeep, its highest-volume and most profitable brands, are down 28% in the same period, while overall industry sales are up 6.4%. Stellantis' profits also declined by more than 70% from 2023 to 2024. 

Jeep Wagoneer S -

Jeep Wagoneer S

Filosa’s immediate task is to bring Stellantis back from this latest crisis. At the same time, he has to establish a new way of working that isn’t just another period of living off profits, which starves future products in a way that could lead to yet another crisis by the early 2030s, or even sooner. This is a particularly challenging period for a company like Stellantis. In North America, it faces a president with vacillating policies on trade and tariffs who is also trying to turn the clock back 20 years on emissions and fuel economy standards. In Europe, Stellantis is facing an existential threat from Chinese automakers that grows by the day. 

Under Tavares, PSA went on a binge of acquisitions that grew volumes well beyond the organic pathway that improving products would bring. He acquired GM’s European operations, Opel and Vauxhall, and then added FCA, eventually saddling Stellantis with 14 brands. Frankly, there are just too many brands to support with unique products, each requiring expensive turns at the marketing trough to try to get consumers’ attention. 

Chrysler Pacifica

Additionally, too many of those brands have limited lineups. Trying to grow them will just cannibalize its stronger brands. Chrysler is a perfect example. Realistically, in North America, the only products it’s likely to gain much market traction with are more crossovers, but that would lead to more overlap with Jeep and, to a lesser extent, Dodge. Regrettably, Chrysler doesn’t have enough brand cache to compete upmarket with the likes of Lexus or Genesis either. While the brand has a 100-year heritage, in the 2020s, it’s probably better just to cut it loose. 

After more than a decade of trying, selling Fiats in North America also isn’t getting any traction and it’s sucking marketing and development resources from other brands. Fiat still has a reasonable presence in Europe and could survive there. Peugeot, Citroen, Opel, and Vauxhall are all battling for the same customers as well, and DS has never really been able to thrive as a standalone brand apart from Citroen. 

Filosa needs to make some hard decisions very soon. However, he also needs to set up an organizational structure that encourages innovation and keeps a focus on creating great products well into the future. Surges of investment and starvation will never succeed, and simply cutting costs is also insufficient. Changing a corporate culture is extremely difficult. 

Many people who have worked with Antonio Filosa have spoken highly of him. Let’s hope he can leverage that goodwill to build a culture focused on the long term, instead of just responding to what’s directly in front of the team.

Filosa knows very well that Stallantis doesn’t exist to “make cars;” they’re in the business of making money by making cars — ideally for stakeholders well into the future.