Are You The Single Person Who Bought A Brand New Jeep Patriot Last Quarter?

It’s the start of 2024, which means that every automaker under the sun is busy publishing reports on how many cars they sold last year. As in any business, there are winners and losers, but there are also some genuinely strange artifacts that appear from beyond the grave. In the fourth quarter of 2023, Stellantis reported the sale of one singular brand new Jeep Patriot, a head-scratcher if ever I’ve seen one.

In case you haven’t been keeping track, and I really can’t blame you, the Jeep Patriot exited production the same year “Closer” by The Chainsmokers hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Yep, that’s 2016, a full seven years prior to the end of 2023, during which time we’ve seen entire vehicles go in and out of production. The Aston Martin DB11, Chevrolet Bolt, Infiniti Q60, and Toyota C-HR did all that they needed to do in the time between the end of the Patriot and the most recent reported sale, and those cars definitely weren’t limited-run models or insignificant.

The Jeep Patriot wasn’t exactly Chrysler’s crowning achievement, but it was cheap. For a while, it was the cheapest crossover you could buy new, so it shouldn’t be surprising that it sold well. After all, some people just want an inexpensive box that can move them and all their stuff at 70 mph down an interstate, and the Patriot did just that. Unusually, its second-last model year was its most successful ever. Sure, supply was built to ensure a limited 2017 model year run, but selling 121,926 examples of a car first produced in 2007 some nine years into its production run is a feat on its own.

In all fairness, the Patriot wasn’t all bad. It was exceptionally practical, the available tailgate-mounted speakers were neat, and the seats were unusually plush for such a budget-oriented car. Amusingly, you could also option it in a complete technophobe spec, without so much as air conditioning or power windows. Remember, it wasn’t that long ago that basic cars were truly and completely basic.

Weirdly, the Jeep Patriot isn’t the only zombie Stellantis product that saw a year-over-year sales increase in 2023. Sales of the Chrysler 200, a midsize sedan that exited production in December 2016, were actually up year-over-year with four reported sales in 2023 versus three in 2022. It’s not like Stellantis is making more of them, so where are these cars coming from? Is it just a matter of reconciling old reports, or have there actually been a handful of brand-new Chrysler 200s stashed way in back of at least one dealership?

Either way, if you happened to buy a brand new Jeep Patriot in the fourth quarter of 2023, we’d like to hear from you. Assuming this is the actual sale of a physical car within that reporting period, there has to be one hell of a story involved. It’s not uncommon for sales of a discontinued model to linger a year after production ends, but a sudden re-emergence on the sales charts seven years after the end of production borders on necromancy, as a model name cast to the depths pops its head above the surface for one last gasp of air.

Photo credits: Jeep, Chrysler
Top graphic images: Jeep, Yulia Gapeenko/Vecteezy

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