- Former Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares personally helped kill off the legendary Hemi V8, former co-workers claim.
- “Everyone wanted to keep [the Hemi],” a Stellantis source told CNBC this week following Tavares’s departure.
- The Hemi V8 is still available as a crate engine, and in select body-on-frame models, but not in the new Charger.
Carlos Tavares resigned his position as Stellantis CEO last week, and he’ll be remembered by investors as the man who tanked the automaker’s profitability, and by dealers for creating bloated inventories and uncompetitive MSRPs. But according to insiders, Tavares’s legacy also includes personally killing off the legendary Hemi V8 in the face of massive internal and external opposition.
“Everybody wanted to keep [the Hemi],” a Stellantis exec told CNBC on the condition of anonymity. “But it was ‘you need to be greener.’”
Related: How Would You Save Stellantis?
Although the Hemi is still available as a crate engine, and can, for now, be ordered in models like the Jeep Wrangler, Dodge Durango (which dies soon), and big trucks, it was removed from the Stellantis passenger car lineup in favor of the Hurricane inline-six. The new Dodge Charger was only designed to take Hurricane and EV powertrains, and there’s no suggestion at this point that it could be re-engineered (at a reasonable cost) to take the much-loved V8.
CNBC’s sources also accuse the Portuguese former PSA chief of being fixated on short-term cost reductions, a stance that led to mismanagement of the company’s product lineup as well as its plans, suppliers, unions, and dealers.
One insider said Tavares acted like he knew everything and didn’t listen to advice. Another accused him of blaming US execs for the firm’s problems instead of holding his hands up to his own failings.
“If you don’t know the market, you don’t know the customers, you can’t make the right decisions,” the unnamed source told CNBC.
Tavares earned almost $40 million in salary, stock, and other options last year, but it’s not known what Stellantis paid him to clear his desk earlier this month. The company is currently being run by a 10-person committee headed by John Elkann, while it decides who should be next to occupy the hot seat. Tim Kuniskis, who did much to build the Hemi and Dodge into the cultural muscle icons they are, retired in May but has been lured back to become CEO of RAM.
Do you think Stellantis will be able to re-engineer its passenger cars to take the Hemi, or should we just all move on? And who would you hire as CEO to turn Stellantis’s fortunes around?
