The Jeep Cherokee will come back from the dead after all. Jeep CEO Antonio Filosa announced the news Thursday at the Los Angeles Auto Show, saying the Cherokee will return in 2025. This time, it will pack a hybrid powertrain.
After discontinuing the Cherokee in 2023, Jeep left the door open for a replacement. What shape it would take and where it would be built remained entirely up in the air, though. We now at least know part of the equation; as for where it will be built, that still remains to be seen. The outgoing Cherokee was manufactured at the Belvidere Assembly facility in Illinois, though the plant has been idle since production ceased.
Neither Filosa nor Jeep North America CEO Bob Broderdorf offered any further details about the revived SUV, but a report from earlier this year may provide some clues. The 2025 Jeep Recon was originally slated to be an all-electric model built alongside Jeep’s existing ICE and hybrid portfolio, but if that report proves to be true, it means Jeep likely has internal combustion variants of the Recon in development. If so, that would provide Jeep with the opportunity to revive the Cherokee formula without necessarily reviving its name—a long-standing point of contention with America’s Cherokee Nation.
The Cherokee was built in one form or another for 49 years prior to last year’s production shutdown. The penultimate version (and the last with a solid rear axle) was sold in the United States as the Jeep Liberty (and its badge-engineered twin, the Dodge Nitro). The outgoing model, produced between 2014 and 2023, abandoned the hybrid body-on-frame/unibody construction of previous Cherokees in favor of a modernized, front-wheel-drive-based architecture.
It also filled a rather conspicuous hole in Jeep’s admittedly unconventional SUV lineup. While the Jeep Compass is nominally a compact SUV, its European platform makes it a bit undersized compared to the Honda CR-Vs and Toyota RAV4s of the world, offering similar passenger room but comparatively abysmal cargo space. The Cherokee leaned more toward the midsize segment, offering competitive space and more capable off-road bits. That formula wasn’t compelling enough to keep Cherokee sales afloat, but will a hybrid offering do the trick? Who knows.
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