Jeep Is Selling More Wranglers Than Ever, Needs Toledo To Build Many More Wranglers

After averaging 7500 Wrangler sales in the five Januarys leading up to 2015, Jeep sold 11,683 Wranglers in America last month, a January record for the nameplate.

Record-setting figures are nothing new for the Wrangler, of course. Chrysler Group/FCA broke their annual Wrangler one-year-old sales record by 13,833 units in 2013 and then smashed that with a 19,826-unit, 13% improvement in the 2014 calendar year.

Year-over-year, the pace of U.S. Wrangler sales expansion is even more impressive of late.

The Wrangler was certainly not unpopular a decade ago, but with a more family-friendly four-door Unlimited now the Wrangler of choice, the jeepiest of Jeeps is now firmly entrenched in the mainstream.

The Wrangler was America’s 18th-best-selling utility vehicle in 2005; the 17th-best-selling in 2006. But with a four-door model, it became the tenth-best-selling SUV/crossover in 2007. It moved up to eighth in 2008, slid back to tenth in 2009, fell out of the top ten in 2010, moved back up to ninth in 2011, eighth in 2012 and 2013, and then claimed the ninth spot in 2014.

The big figure? Over the course of the last 109 months – January 2006 to January 2015 inclusive – 1,067,125 Wranglers were sold in the United States.

More than one million Jeep Wrangler sales in less than a decade.

Yet with growing global demand, FCA boss Sergio Marchionne demands greater production. The Toledo, Ohio, plant where Wranglers are assembled currently has capacity for 240,000 units, according to the Detroit Free Press, and very nearly that many were sold around the world last year.

Canadians alone snapped up a record-setting 23,057 Wranglers in 2014 in addition to the 175,328 sold in the U.S.

We’ll know soon enough whether Toledo and FCA can come to an agreement. One thing remains more easily confirmable: every month, Jeep will continue to sell more Wranglers than they did in the same period one year earlier. Year-over-year, U.S. Jeep sales increased in each of the last 16 months.

Timothy Cain is the founder of GoodCarBadCar.net, which obsesses over the free and frequent publication of U.S. and Canadian auto sales figures.