The Chrysler Town & Country PHEV will launch a year early.
Back in May, Fiat Chrysler made some pretty big announcements about the direction the company would be taking in the next few years. Perhaps the biggest of the announcements was the Chrysler Town & Country PHEV, a plug-in hybrid minivan that would yield 75 mpg. Company CEO, Sergio Marchionne, indicated that the model would be due out in 2016, but it seems now that the model will be arriving a year early, in late 2015.
The news comes straight from the mouth of Marchionne himself, who spilled his secrets at the Paris Motor Show to Automotive News. The Town & Country isn’t supposed to enter into its next generation, however, until 2016, so we’re not quite sure if that platform will be arriving early, or if the Chrysler Town & Country PHEV will just be built on the current chassis.
The fact that Chrysler is investing in a plug-in hybrid at all is still mind-boggling, given Marchionne’s pessimistic take on electrified technology. In fact, he stated, “I think you need to be very, very careful if you think that electrification, given its inherent limitations on range, especially in markets like the U.S., will effectively displace combustion. It will never provide the travel distance that you require, especially based on what we know today about the storage capabilities of batteries. I keep on running into this fundamental economic obstacle of overcoming the cost equation of electrification. You can’t. You can’t unless there is a wholesale change and a fundamental shift in the pricing structure of cars.”
(Isn’t he just a barrel full of sunshine?)
We’ll bring you more updates on the Chrysler Town & Country PHEV as they are available.
News Source: Automotive News (sub. req.)
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