Fiat Couldn’t Even Sell A Single Car Per Day Last Quarter

Damn. DAMN. The Detroit 2.5 reported full-year and Q4 sales this morning, and it’s a race to the bottom for some Stellantis brands, with a little bit of hopefulness for others. I’ll use The Morning Dump today to review how each automaker stacks up, because that’s fun for me.

Obviously, I’m going to start with Stellantis because I got the utterly insane stat that Fiat is now below the car-per-day number, and way below the car-per-dealership amount. While Fiat and Alfa are struggling, it’s not all cumulonimbus clouds. At least some brands are seeing some… Cirrus.

GM technically underperformed relative to Stellantis in Q4 in terms of sales velocity, but not in a way that really matters. General Motors had a good year in spite of it all. As did Ford.

CES is going on, and I suspect you’ll hear a little more about it. One of the interesting announcements is that Mercedes is going to be the next carmaker to rival Tesla’s FSD in the United States.

Fiat Sold Just 84 Cars In 91 Days

There are two cars that Fiat sells in the United States. One is the new Fiat 500, an electric car that’s absolutely decent if you’re one of the extraordinarily low number of people who want to pay a lot of money for a low-range city car. It’s likely that there are more people who wrote fan fiction based on the short-lived Jonathan Silverman-led sitcom The Single Guy in the fourth quarter than bought a Fiat 500.

The other car is the Fiat 500X, which isn’t a new car so much as an old car that Fiat dealers still can’t sell. Overall, Fiat sold one car for every four Fiat dealers. You can look at the full sales release here, from FCA US LLC, which is technically the name of the American-based subsidiary of Stellantis. Fiat is in bad shape, but that’s nothing new. Alfa, too.

The Ram brand was down 4%, although a lot of that has to do with slipping sales for both the ProMaster and Ram HD (both of which are made in Mexico). The Ram 1500 was up 23% year-over-year for the quarter, thanks in part to the return of the V8.

Jeep? It was up 5%, thanks to a huge push for Gladiator. The Wrangler, too, was up 3% to 39,268 sales. This does mean that the Wrangler outsold the Bronco overall, although it was tight. Chrysler and Dodge were somewhat surprisingly the biggest movers, at 29% and 26% growth, respectively. For Chrysler, this is all about minivans, because, well, that’s all there is. The 29% increase in minivan sales is just enough to make up for losses earlier in the year, so the brand is overall up 1% year-over-year. My guess is that a lot of people got good deals on a van last quarter.

Dodge’s sales were, of course, from huge EV Charger sales. Just kidding! Only 346 people bought the EV Charger. Was it in the Hornet? No, of course not. It’s the Durango! A huge 114% increase in Durango sales was not enough to make up for the lack of Dodge products, so the brand was still down 28% for the year, and Stellantis as a whole dropped 3%.

Stellantis is one of those companies you have to give time to, as there are still strong brands there, and it’s not impossible for them to create good products. The company is still living in the aftermath of Carlos Tavares and will be for some time.

GM Sales Technically Down, But No One Cares Because Pickup Trucks

No one wants to lose sales, but profitability is more important than growth, and my guess is that GM was way more profitable in North America than Stellantis was last year. I’m sure Q4 financials for Jeep’s parent company are going to look a lot worse than the ones for Buick’s parent.

Here’s the full breakdown of Q4 GM sales and, yeah, every brand struggled a bit. For Buick, which was still up for the full year, a lot of it has to do with the Buick Envision, which is built in China. The brand still had its best sales since before the pandemic. Cadillac was down, too, as it’s feeling the loss of the XT4 and a general disinterest in its gas-powered crossover game. The CT4 and CT5 saw a rise, as maybe sedans aren’t entirely dead.

Chevy had a big year overall, hitting more than 1.829 million sales, but a big drop in EV sales and a lack of a sedan seems to have taken a toll. The Trax, which had its best year ever, also saw big drop in Q4, and I’ve asked GM why that is. My guess is that GM slowed the imports of the Trax from South Korea until the tariff issues were clarified, and it seems like more are on the way.

Trucks lead the way, with GM having the best-selling full-sized truck if you combine GMC and Chevy, which Ford will not agree with, but that’s what’s happening. GM was also the second biggest EV producer in the US in 2025.

Ford Finishes The Year Strong

A part of me wanted to see the Bronco defeat the Wrangler this year if only for the headline and topshot combo. It didn’t happen, but I don’t think Ford is sweating the 146,007 Broncos the brand sold this year. That’s even more than the smaller, cheaper Bronco Sport, which ended up in 134,493 driveways.

There’s a way to look at it that the Bronco is the new Ford Taurus, which is insane but basically true. Are cars dead? No! Ford managed to sell 45,333 Mustangs this year, which is up 3% year-over-year. It’s not bad to be the only game in town, I suppose.

As with GM, the most important measure for Ford is the F-Series, and all F-XXXs were down slightly in Q4 (mostly due to F-150 Lightning sales), but overall the F-Series grew by 8.3% this year, leading Ford to a 6.2% rise overall.

Most importantly, though, it was the best year for the Maverick.

Lincoln was more even this year, only rising 2%, which isn’t great, and also reflects the difficulty of selling a Chinese-built car in the United States.

Mercedes Thinks It’ll Compete With Tesla On ‘Self-Driving’

As explained in this video from Mercedes, the new CLA has what the company is calling Level 2++, which is a totally made-up, not real thing. Tesla calls this “Full Self-Driving,” but no lawyer at Daimler would ever approve it, so Mercedes calls this “MB.Drive Assist Pro.” Who lets Mercedes name things? The company is just terrible at it.

What’s important, though, is that this tech has been offering the same supervised point-to-point driving ability in China that Tesla offers in the United States. Now, it’s coming to the US, as Mercedes announced yesterday:

With Mercedes-Benz’s MB.DRIVE ASSIST PRO, driving assistance and navigation merge to create a completely new and safe driving experience. At the press of a button, the vehicle can help navigate through the city streets – from the parking lot to the destination – with advanced SAE-Level 2 assistance. Thanks to Mercedes-Benz’s cooperative steering approach, steering adaptions are possible at any time without deactivating the system.

MB.DRIVE ASSIST PRO uses some 30 sensors, including 10 cameras, 5 radar sensors and 12 ultrasonic sensors. All of these provide raw data to an extremely powerful supercomputer, which is capable of up to 508 TOPs.

The system should cost around $3,950 for three years, although a monthly membership price is coming. By comparison, it’s $8,000 or $99 a month for the Tesla system.

While other ADAS systems exist in the United States, they’re somewhat limited in which roads they can be used on (although GM’s SuperCruise will add streets soon). Mercedes is basically saying you can use it everywhere and that, like the Tesla, it doesn’t need LIDAR. The Mercedes CLA just got a lot more interesting.

What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD

I had a lot of writing to do today, so what better way to get bumped than with the MSTRKRFT remix of “Heartbeat” by Annie. Let’s dance.

The Big Question

You have to build a garage with a new product from each of the Big 2.5. What’s your garage look like?

Top photo: Fiat