If you happen to be a customer of Stellantis’ Lifetime Maximum Care warranty and you’ve found service to be painfully slow since the spring, you’re not alone. A common story has been making the rounds across enthusiast forums going back to April: an owner brings their lifetime-covered Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, or Ram in for an ordinary repair, only to spend a week or more waiting for the work to start — typically without their car. The delay isn’t due to staffing or parts shortages, but rather claim approval. All the while, the owners are left in the dark.
Jalopnik was recently contacted by a Jeep owner in California who spent a week waiting for service to begin on their 2012 Grand Cherokee, which was suffering from an oil leak. This person, who preferred to keep their identity hidden, said they’d been a satisfied user of the Lifetime Maximum Care program for more than a decade. “Never had an issue,” the Jeep owner told Jalopnik over the phone. “I’d take it in, I’d deal with the same service advisor … they would call in the issue, they would get the authorization, if they had to order a part they’d take a day to get it in, they’d fix it and I’d have the car back. Easy.”
But on this most recent occasion in June, things moved much more slowly.
“All of a sudden, the program’s changed,” the owner told Jalopnik. “We now have to email this voiceless center. There’s nothing we can do — we just have to wait to hear back from them.”
What followed was a week of silence from Stellantis’ Maximum Care team. In the past, service personnel would phone in claims for approval. But as of April 1 that was no longer possible, according to stories from customers posted on forums as well as the one that reached out to Jalopnik. The approval now had to come completely over email, and both Chrysler and Mopar Vehicle Protection’s lines seemingly had a gag order about explaining why. One owner over at Ram Forum summed up the runaround well in an April 11 post:
For our owner, this radio silence kicked off a week of check-ins over text with the dealer about the status of their claim. “I would hear back from the service advisor and every day we just had a running chat back and forth, and he’s like ‘man, I’m sorry. I call, there’s nobody to talk to.’
“The dealer said it sucks for them too because their guys are sitting around waiting for the authorization. They have the parts, they have the manpower, and there’s just nothing they can do.” The only recourse the owner was given was a P.O. box to mail a letter to.
All in all, they had to wait 10 days to get their car back — seven for the approval, and then three more once the repair could finally be carried out over a weekend. Some customers experienced longer delays. “I’ve been waiting over 2 weeks for repair approval with no end date in sight,” one Pacifica owner shared on a forum on April 21. At least in that particular case the owner in question was able to keep their van while they waited, which isn’t usually the process while Maximum Care claims are pending.
Jalopnik reached out to Stellantis for comment. Eric Mayne, the automaker’s media relations manager for customer experience, responded with the following statement:
We recently aligned a Mopar Vehicle Protection process with our vehicle warranty process to streamline our response to claims. This transition involved training additional personnel, which may have contributed to occasional delays. The transition is now complete and we are again responding to dealers on behalf of our customers in a timely fashion.
According to Stellantis, the protocol for lifetime warranty approval hasn’t permanently transitioned to fully over email. Now that training is done, things should be carrying on as normal since the backlog of claims has cleared. The experiences shared online all transpired in April, so perhaps there’s some truth to that.
Still, Stellantis couldn’t explain why customers were left in the dark for weeks. A little communication might’ve gone a long way here. If you also have the Lifetime Maximum Care warranty on your vehicle and have recently made a claim or expect to make one soon, please share your experience in the comments below.