- Stellantis has started legal action against a North Carolina dealer that wants it to buy back unsold fleet vehicles worth $180 million.
- Randy Marion Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram in Wilkesboro quit a Stellantis sales and service contract in June and wants the automaker to repurchase 3,841 vehicles.
- The automaker says the dealer untruthfully claimed the vehicles were already sold when ordering them and wants a legal ruling absolving it of the obligation to buy them back.
Stellantis is swamped with inventory right now, and recently revealed that its profits dropped 48 percent in the first six months of the year. So the last thing it needs is to buy back almost 4,000 unsold vehicles from a North Carolina dealer at a cost of $180 million. Stellantis is now suing the dealer to avoid that fate.
Automakers are required to repurchase a dealer’s new-vehicle inventory under NC state law when the two sides part ways, and in June, Dealer principal Randall Marion of Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram in Wilkesboro wrote to inform Stellantis that it was terminating the pair’s sales and service contract.
Related: We Asked You Which Stellantis Brands Should Die, These Are Your Picks
But while Stellantis has no problem with Marion leaving the fold, it does have a problem with buying back its 3,841 fleet vehicles and wants a legal ruling absolving it of that obligation, Auto News report. The automaker claims that the dealer’s decision to order 1,508 fleet vehicles fort stock using its own fleet account number violates its rules that fleet vehicles should only be ordered when there is a customer for that vehicle.
“Over the last three years alone, Marion has ordered thousands of fleet units, ordering many on behalf of specific customers,” the suit alleges. “Marion has recently revealed that the fleet units it reported as sold to specific customers were untrue and that Marion has amassed a remarkably atypical, large stock of 3,841 fleet units.”
Many of the vehicles were large pickup trucks that were in high demand during the pandemic and Stellantis claims the dealer planned to amass a large stock of them to sell at high prices. Stellantis’s legal team claims that the dealer additionally ordered a further 2,273 vehicles using fleet numbers belonging to two large corporate customers without their knowledge.
The suit also alleges that Marion is trying to get it to repurchase hundreds of vehicles that it bought from other dealers, and says that modifications made to some of the fleet vehicles automatically voids the state law’s requirement for Stellantis to buy them back.
