Is it possible that the hyper-rare 2009 Chrysler Aspen hybrid is actually…underrated? I know, this is hard to comprehend given its rather, uh, interesting styling not dissimilar to its platform-mate, the also “interesting” Dodge Durango. But look past that styling and you’ll find a hybrid system that’s actually quite fascinating.
I spotted this Chrysler Aspen Hybrid at O’Reilly Auto Parts, where I met an awesome engineer from our friends at Munro & Associates — the master benchmarkers, and runners of the YouTube channel Munro Live. We chatted in the parking lot, and I noticed that he drives this incredible machine.
This is a beautifully-maintained version of an incredibly rare machine, which was only built for two months in 2008. It features a 300-volt hybrid system with two electric motors integrated into a four-speed automatic transmission. The Nickel-Metal Hydride battery pack is located under the middle-row seats; it gets charged up during braking as a part of a regenerative braking strategy, and it feeds the motors in the transmission at strategic times to maximize efficiency.
Those strategic times include at speeds under 25 mph, when the two 87 horsepower electric motors can actually propel the vehicle without assistance from the 5.7-liter Hemi V8. At other times, like during highway cruising, the Hemi can drop down into its Multi-Displacement mode, when it’s only running four cylinders, and receive torque assistance from the motors integrated in the transmission.
Chrysler describes the hybrid system — co-developed with General Motors, Mercedes, and BMW — in a press release, writing:
Chrysler’s advanced, state-of-the-art two-mode full hybrid system — developed in partnership with General Motors, Mercedes-Benz and The BMW Group — integrates proven automatic-transmission technology with a patented hybrid-electric drive system to deliver the world’s first two-mode full hybrid.
As a result of low- and high-speed electric continuously variable transmission (ECVT) modes, the system is defined as a “two-mode hybrid.” In addition, the sophisticated fuel-saving system incorporates four fixed-gear ratios for high efficiency and power-handling capabilities. During the two ECVT modes, the system can use the electric motors for acceleration, improving fuel economy, or for regenerative braking to utilize energy that would normally be lost during braking or deceleration. The energy is stored in the batteries for later use.
The system’s two modes are optimized for city and highway driving.
In the first mode — at low speed and with light loads — the vehicle can operate in three ways:
- Electric power only
- Engine power only
- Any combination of engine and electric power
The two-mode hybrid provides all of the fuel-saving benefits of a full-hybrid system, including electric-only operation. In this mode, the engine is “shut off,” with the vehicle moving under electric-only power at low speed. The result is a significant reduction in fuel consumption in heavy stop-and-go traffic.
The second mode is used primarily at highway speeds. In addition to electric assist, the second mode provides full power from the 5.7-liter HEMI® V-8 when conditions demand it, such as when passing, pulling a trailer or climbing a steep grade.
The company dives into the control strategy, writing:
A sophisticated controller determines when the vehicle should operate in the first or second mode. Input from the controller determines the necessary torque for the driving conditions and sends a corresponding command to the engine and electric motors. The engine and electric motors transfer torque to a series of gears in the transmission, which multiply torque similar to a conventional automatic transmission to propel the vehicle. Unlike conventional continuously variable transmissions, however, the two-mode full hybrid’s electrically controlled system uses no mechanical belts or bands. Shifts between the two modes are synchronous — meaning no engine speed changes are necessary for the mode shift to occur — resulting in seamless accelerations.
The 300-volt battery pack provides electric power for the system, and is designed to fit in the vehicle without compromising passenger space. A rectifier located under the vehicle’s hood converts AC to DC, to power conventional 12-volt accessories, such as interior lighting, climate control and the audio system. The vehicle’s internal-combustion engine efficiently maintains the battery pack.
Here’s a look at the battery pack, per Green Tec Auto:
And here’s a peek at the transmission:
The system apparently works reasonably well, as the Aspen and its Durango sibling — both four-wheel drive and capable of towing 6,000 pounds — are rated at over 20 MPG combined. That’s a massive jump over even two-wheel drive non-hybrid Hemi models:
Only a couple hundred of these machines ever made it off the assembly line at the Newark Assembly Plant in Delaware, but that doesn’t mean there was anything wrong with them. It was really Chrysler’s bankruptcy that put the machine out to pasture, with the gentleman from Munro actually praising it, noting that he actually owns two, both of which regularly score over 20 MPG.
I was never a fan of the styling of either the Durango or the Aspen, but the hybrid models seem compelling. They’re big, comfortable, 390 horsepower, boat-towing beasts with a Hemi V8 under the hood and fuel economy over 20 MPG. That’s just awesome.
I’ll ignore what seems like nightmarish 12-volt battery placement (see above) and instead note that the Durango and Aspen featured a Watts-Link rear suspension that actually mounts to the differential cover! Check this out!
Man, I need a Durango or Aspen Hybrid. It’s a phrase I never thought I’d utter, but here we are.
I can see it now. David cruising around in the big Chrysler with his groundhog, Aspen, on his lap. “You’re doing remarkably well for a quadruped.”
My neighbor has one – it’s her DD. I noticed the hybrid badging a couple of years ago but didn’t realize just how rare it is – if there were only 200 made, there can’t be more than a handful in Canada.
I was a technical training instructor at Chrysler LLC when the Hybrid Aspen/Durango debuted. I was also one of the few instructors who taught classes on this hybrid system. I never liked the styling of these, but they were not bad to drive at all. The fuel economy benefits were very real. The car did everything they told us it would do, including some heavy towing. I personally drove an ’09 Durango Hybrid with a 5000-lb Grand Caravan in tow on an open trailer (with a disassembled hybrid transmission and a demo hybrid battery assembly onboard) from Phoenix to Los Angeles and it performed well. That trip was one of the last tasks I performed before I reluctantly accepted the “voluntary” termination agreement and left the company in November of 2008. The company was reducing headcount at that time in a feeble attempt at avoiding bankruptcy. My department was being outsourced, so I had no real choice.
For your amusement, a few tidbits:
* The transmission was manufactured by Allison and was based on the concept of the (very successful) hybrid city bus transmission that they were building.
* E-motor A (the front one) was used to crank/start the engine as well as modify gear ratios for the CVT modes. E-motor A acted as a variable slip “clutch” for one of the elements in a planetary gear set, thus providing a continuously variable ratio.
* The transmission had no reverse gear. E-motor B (the rear one) was used to propel the car any time reverse was engaged. It was not possible to direct engine power to the wheels in reverse. E-motor B was also used for regenerative braking as well as propulsion assist.
Even though I heavily despise that generation Durango, I can’t help but feel that the Aspen has a certain charm to it.
It definitely looks better.
20mpg and a 6,000lb tow rating is pretty damn good, GM only managed 18mpg and a 7000lb capacity from their mid 1990s B-bodies
David, I very much hope you asked this person “So, how’s your Aspen?”
I have a few coworkers that came from FCA and they said there were plans to put this setup into the Challenger/Charger but with more powerful electric motors. Unfortunately management pulled the plug because going hybrid would have “alienated their marketbase” and softened the brand image. Again, thats FCA management so thats FCA logic.
A shame. A six cylinder hybrid Challenger would have been great.
And Ford just killed the proposed hybrid Mustang, because they’re selling enough Mustang Mach Es and F-150 Lightnings to meet their CAFE average without needing to make any ICE models more fuel efficient.
Really seems like automakers are just all in some sort of a secret pact to keep hybrid powertains out of anything really appealing
It’s been years since I saw an Aspen of any kind and I really had all but forgotten about them. Still though, an Aspen hybrid is pretty interesting. Not good, just interesting. I saw a Silverado hybrid the other day and thought the same thing. Not “cool!”, just “huh.”
There is one on my street and another a few blocks away, I didn’t know how rare they were, did they get more of them in Canada ?
i was NOT expecting to see anything involving Durangos/Aspens but i’m so glad it’s happened
Ah cool, another member of the “wow this would be a cool secondhand tow vehicle if they bothered to make more than twelve of them” club. The Saab 9-7 Aero was getting lonely.
Too bad they didn’t offer that hybrid shit on their smaller cars back then.
David isn’t wrong here. The problem is that the hybrid system went in at exactly the same time as Cerberus’ fuckery and the great recession. So, you guessed it, it got slashed and burned and every corner they could cut was, along with every corner they couldn’t.
Quality? Yeah. No. Forget the supplier we signed a deal with, these guys will do it for $0.05 less.
You want to know how deep the fuckery went? There were Grand Cherokee hybrid prototypes. The ND Durango/Aspen are Dakota-derived but the drivelines are 1:1 with the WK. And to put Cerberus’ fuckery into stark perspective… 2008 was the absolute worst years of Grand Cherokee sales ever – literally less than 25% of any other year. Here’s the numbers:
2009 Dodge Durango sales (all models and trims): 3,521
2009 Chrysler Aspen sales (all models and trims): 5,996
2009 Jeep Grand Cherokee sales (all models and trims): 50,328
Yeah. More than 5 times as many units as the Durango and Aspen combined. In it’s worst year ever. In typical years, it was more than 8 times as many units on average. But again: this is when the scumbags at Cerberus got their hands on the remnants and went on a spree of slash and burn of engineering. Consequently, the 12v battery location is even dumber than you think it is.
It’s literally mounted to a cheap stamped steel shelf that was bolted up to the outside of the driver’s frame rail as an afterthought. Changing it isn’t as bad as you’d think, but it’s also completely exposed to the elements and the worst road salt. There’s absolutely no protection for battery or the insufficiently galvanized stamped steel. I was told by people in the know that the 12V battery was in fact, originally meant to be located under the rear seats and later the cargo area when the rear seats were used for HV disconnect access.
But as I said: it’s a Cerberus victim. Just popping the hood, you can immediately see that good engineering was fucked up in the name of cost. Routing cables properly cost a few fractions of a cent more in copper, so don’t do that. Instead of properly integrated placement, many things are literally just blatantly tacked on as afterthoughts. The fancy ‘regen braking’ display in the head unit is just Alpine software, built into everything. Any high-speed CANbus unit (RER and later) has it.
I am and remain convinced that literally the only reason Cerberus built it at all was to dump parts inventory and for emissions credits. They very, very clearly didn’t want to for both good and bad reasons. (It was expensive as hell, in the middle of a recession, on the tail-end of an acquisition that had sent confidence and sales plummeting as well.) The design and tooling had been done long beforehand. Yet they very publicly discontinued them less than 2 months after launch, and used it as an excuse to permanently shutter Newark Assembly early (in continuous operation since 1951.)
Amazing that the Engineering By Committee Pipeline never had a meeting on “hey should road spray be able to hit the battery?”
They did. And then Cerberus came along and almost certainly said “we can deny warranty claims on batteries so fuck you, do this.” Cerberus committed an absolutely incomprehensible amount of warranty fraud against dealers and customers alike in the name of making a buck. This is literally a “company” that in 2020 at the height of the pandemic, tried like hell to close a bunch of hospitals because they were ‘unprofitable.’
Capital venture firms, and certainly Cerberus, should be put to fire like we would do to any other parasite found on one’s underbelly.
Committees -Because none of us is as dumb as all of us!
It takes more than one person to be that exceptionally stupid.
Always thought the grooved hood was an interesting piece of styling. Fun internet fact: Lee Iacocca took delivery of the first Aspen hybrid
Well yeah! It’s the Holy Grail of DN platforms. What are you waiting for?
I wanted one of these back when they were new, but I didn’t really need to own a tow vehicle at the time, and I lost a huge chunk of my income during the early days of the recession.
I assumed that they would be improved every year, and by the time my income recovered, a better version would be available. Their discontinuance was a huge surprise, and at least a year or so before my personal economic recovery.
I pretty much forgot about them since then. Didn’t expect to see them again until they were far too rusty to be appealing. Nice find (x2), and nice article.
David, you’re looking at another decade or so of oxidation before one of these is suitable for your fleet. Patience, young man.
Came here to say this but “it needs 15 Michigan winters on it”.
The Aspens are not bad looking, especially with a mild lift and slightly larger tires. There’s no help for the Durango though.
I remember when the big 3 execs made a show out of driving from MI to DC to negotiate bailout terms, in a effort to show that they were cutting costs by not taking corporate jets. If I recall correctly some (all?) of the Chrysler contingent drove Aspen Hybrids and I think they had already scrapped production plans by the time the bailout road trip happened.
The main issue with the hybrid system is that it’s in a Chrysler Aspen.
Ooof, that front is just terrible. And just to put the crap cherry on top the the shit sundae, they put a chrome cap on the front bumper.
Yup, the system is solid, and I’m happy to admit the contemporary GMT900’s that used the same tech are underrated, but there wasn’t much good coming out of Cerberus-era Chrysler.
They made some two hundred of those & your acquaintance owns two? Not too many people can lay claim to owning a full one percent of a model’s production… ha, yeah, the one time when being in the 1% can actually be seen as a positive. If you can score one you’d own a good 0.05% of said model production but I daresay whatever you write about it would be of great interest to quite a few of us readers.
Even more insane, the Two Mode hybrid system was a joint venture between GM, DaimlerChrysler and BMW. The Tahoe/Yukon/Escalade, Silverado/Sierra, and Avalanche had the same system and literally everyone at the time hated it, calling it half-assed at best.
Small quibble, there was no Avalanche hybrid, only the trucks and the SWB SUVs.
It’s also too bad that these weren’t embraced more, as the actual fuel savings vs a standard truck dwarf those of something like switching a regular sedan to a Prius.
It’s something that most people don’t think about. It’s really hard to get a 40mpg to 45mpg. And really really hard to get the 45mpg car to 50mpg. And those are decreasing returns – 12.5% and then 11% and so on. Getting 5mpg out of a big truck or SUV is a HUGE decrease in fuel usage. But “meh, 19mpg isn’t a whole lot more than 14mpg, so whatever”
I find it easier to see the savings when calculating the gallons per hundred miles (akin to how things are done in Europe, with liters/100km) and not the mpg number. Going from 40 to 45 mpg is a saving of about 1/4 gallon per hundred miles (from 2.5 gal/100mi to 2.22 gal/100mi). At $4 gas, that’s $1/100 mi, or $100 in a year where you drive 10,000 miles. Going from 15 to 20 mpg is a saving of 1 2/3 gallons per hundred miles (6.67 to 5 gal/100mi), which is a savings of nearly $7/100 mi, or $700 in a year of driving 10,000 miles. That’s a huge difference. For all that people said lousy things about the cash for clunkers process, getting people from 15 or 10 mpg up to 20 mpg was a really big deal. Going from 10 to 20? That’s 5 gal/100mi saved, $2000/year. Going from 10 to 35 is even better: I knew a guy who kept his work truck in my town, bought himself a Nissan Versa for the 70+ mile drive each way, and LOVED it. Paid off the car in a few years with the money he saved on gas. Sure, it was a Versa, and he was okay with that.
I think the issue with the introduction of these by GM at the time wasn’t that they weren’t a good system, but that the American public is shitty at math. They see “a couple more MPG” any think “well that’s not worth it” when in reality it’s a 20%+ fuel economy improvement.
A quick search shows higher numbers than I actually remember for the Escalade (and I think I’ve seen more Escalades around than I ever saw Silverado/Sierras which makes sense I guess). 20city/23hwy for the hybrid in 2013 versus 14/18 for the standard. 20 doesn’t sounds like good gas mileage when Prii and Volts are getting well into the 40s, but it’s a 40% improvement.
One, BMW’s work was actually done by ZF, because BMW. And two, the system itself was a joint development but the transmissions are far more different than claimed. Wildly different. There are many cutaways of the Chrysler version, which very clearly show that it uses hard parts from the 545RFE and other contemporaries. It’s not just bell housing and snout. GM’s 2ML70 is vastly different inside and out. Where Chrysler’s used a 3 gear planetary, GM used a 4. Another location, Chrysler has a 5 gear planet while GM is 4. GM has additional inspection platesTheory of operation and electronic control is the same, but specific implementations differ.
And GM’s biggest problem by far was that their entire effort was not even half-assed. They tried to build it like “here’s a battery and we’re just I dunno gonna add an alternator or something.” Just very deeply stupid and deliberately ineffective, especially as the GM hybrid got a bespoke all-aluminum casting which also deleted cylinder deactivation. And not just because AFM was routinely causing catastrophic failure to engines in warranty.
Chrysler when they designed it, from word one said it was to be bolted to the 5.7 with MDS. (Gen3/Eagle VVT bolt patterns are identical.) MDS was very well proven, as well as the 545RFE, both having probably north of 10 million warranty miles by ’08. There would be no bespoke engine, period, and it would retain MDS. (Which is why it gets 20MPG; even off battery on cruise it’s running on 4 cylinders. And MDS remains far superior to AFM/DFM. Just adding MDS is over 10% improvement in fuel economy.)
Which is why Chrysler’s setup worked where GM’s failed. GM deliberately sabotaged themselves once again, because they didn’t want to build it in the first place. BMW’s failure? They put it in the X6 only, with a pricetag that crossed six digits if you ticked a single option box, in the middle of the Great Recession. Yeah, that was totally going to work. Same with MB (who got it from prior Dumber-Chrysler ownership) who put it in the ML450 at an MSRP north of $85,000.
So what really sunk the Hemi Hybrid wasn’t the technology being bad for the time, or the design being half-assed. It was the vultures at Cerberus who absolutely positively did not want to build it, period. They quite literally terminated it and closed the entire plant less than 2 months after the sales launch with huge press events.
Plus they used the 6.0L, so against the Tahoe and Yukon at least, it had a power bump over the standard 5.3L despite getting “the same gas mileage” (aka people looking at just the highway rating of ~20-22 mpg), and closer combined power rating to the 6.2L (actually more torque IIRC).
Saturn was supposed to offer the Two-Mode system on the VUE as well starting in 2009, using the 3.6L V6.
Not going to lie…low key freaked out when I saw an Aspen Hybrid in-person. Super rare.
the two biggest issues is that the Battery is likely toast or only slightly able to assist at this point and the MDS is like AFM/DOD and Vanos and Ford’s craptacular Cam Phasers of this era. Basically not long for this world in functioning form.
I wonder how many actually sold during the Recession.
200!?
But how many spare parts were made? That’s the rub.