Yahoo Finance Dodge CEO, Muscle Car Godfather Tim Kuniskis Is Retiring
Stellantis announced Friday that Dodge CEO Tim Kuniskis is set to retire on June 1, ending a three-year run as the CEO of a brand undertaking a major pivot from V-8 power to a new electric era without sacrificing the muscle car image that has defined it over the past decade. Kuniskis also served as the CEO of Ram and had roles at Jeep, Maserati, and Alfa Romeo.
Kuniskis had been with Chrysler and its various parent companies since 1992, starting as a trainee and steadily moving up through the company before being appointed as the head of the Fiat brand in 2011. He was first appointed Dodge brand CEO in 2013, starting a long cycle of bouncing through titles varying from head of the Maserati brand to head of all passenger cars at the former Fiat Chrysler group. While both the Charger and Challenger were already in production when he stepped up to the CEO title, his first run at the brand saw Dodge shift its focus heavily toward those performance cars and shed its former volume car image to embrace its muscle car heritage.
His current tenure as Dodge brand CEO started in 2021, a point when the brand was still producing powerful variants of the same Charger, Challenger, and Durango it was building when he first held the title. In the past three years, Kuniskis has directed the company out of that stagnation and toward a clear future as an electric performance brand willing to retain gas-powered offerings. The future Dodge lineup will be anchored by the new Charger and Charger Daytona EV, cars that Kuniskis himself introduced to the press earlier this year.
In addition to his role at Dodge, Kuniskis has served as the brand CEO for Ram since July 2023. That tenure saw Kuniskis face similar problems, a lineup of powerful trucks reliant on V-8s facing a need to electrify. In his time as CEO, the brand introduced an electric Ram 1500 equipped with an on-board generator and an inline-6 successor to the outrageous V-8 Ram TRX.
Matt McAlear, currently a sales executive at Dodge, will take over the Dodge brand when Kuniskis retires on June 1. Christine Feuell, who is currently working to redefine the most stagnant brand in the Stellantis portfolio as the CEO of Chrysler, will take over the lucrative Ram brand.
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