There have been enormous recent reports claiming that Stellantis’ high-performance SRT brand had been “disbanded,” all citing the same statement between a Stellantis spokeswoman and Moparinsiders.com. The statement claimed that “All of the core elements of the SRT performance engineering team have been integrated into our company’s global engineering organization.” However, The Drive spoke with a Stellantis spokesperson and was reassured that SRT “is not going anywhere” and that “the same people [employees] are doing basically the same jobs.”
The original report from Mopar Insiders went on to say that, “This action will have the two-way benefit of ensuring that our brands’ SRT and performance-focused product offerings continue to meet the highest quality standards and expectations while delivering key learnings from motorsports and other high-performance-technology applications across a wider mix of our company’s product lines.”
That statement can be interpreted in a lot of ways. “Integrated into our company’s global engineering organization” could just mean a still-intact SRT group now fits into a larger Stellantis in a slightly different way, or it could mean that these SRT engineers no longer work with each other at all. In the same breath, “[SRT will share] key learnings from motorsports and other high-performance-technology applications across a wider mix of our company’s product lines” could indicate that the group doesn’t solely do performance engineering for SRT products anymore, but has increased responsibilities.
According to our own findings, the SRT group is just organized differently now, with engineers reporting to Stellantis’ truck team, passenger car team, Jeep team, etc. What that means is they don’t all report to one individual group head anymore, they report to several.
So SRT is still with us, SRT-developed products are still going to be released for the foreseeable future, and the group’s engineers are all still doing basically the same thing. What has happened is the people who SRT engineers report to are now different for the sake of spreading their expertise around the newly-formed Stellantis. It’s an organizational change, not a change to SRT’s outlook or its effect on the company’s product.
The Stellantis spokesperson also made the point that SRT engineers already work on products outside the Dodge lineup, such as the Jeep Cherokee Trackhawk,
Ram TRX, and the Jeep Wrangler 392, so not much is really changing here. You can go as far as to say that, if Stellantis had never put out a statement, you wouldn’t be able to tell anything had changed.
So if you’re a fan of SRT, you can take a deep breath. Fast Mopars aren’t going anywhere. The group may have seen some reorganization, but the implication from the Stellantis spokesperson seemed to be—despite the fact that they could not speculate on future product—that the brand’s vehicles going forward won’t all be lame-duck grocery-getters. With the reality that every automaker’s future has to be electrified, well, that likely means some quick SRT-branded EVs in the future.
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