The Jeep Gladiator has one of the best four-wheel-drive systems out there, but the midsize pickup is having a hard time maintaining its grip on sales in the U.S. market. Two years ago, the Gladiator posted its best-ever sales quarter in Q2 2021, followed by its best-ever third quarter in Q3 2021. Overall sales in 2022 fell more than 13% in the U.S. compared to 2021, and through the first half of this year, Gladiator sales are down 29% compared to 2022. Jeep just unveiled the 2024 truck, it’s going to be on its way to dealers soon. Before then, dealers want to get rid of the 2023 stock, which Cars Direct says numbers about 18,000 units in inventory. The same outlet noted that Jeep has rolled out two manufacturer discounts, and dealers have added their own incentives. When Cars Direct checked out a West Covina Jeep dealer’s site, it found discounts of more than $17,000 on a single truck. When The Drive visited the same dealer site a few days later, it found total discounts of $20,000.
The savings starts with Jeep’s manufacturer discount of 10% off MSRP through October 2 for any 2023 Gladiator purchase or lease. California residents get 15% off, and members of the Jeep Gladiator Forum have said Minnesota and a few other states are also part of the 15% club. This can be combined with any other incentive. When we visited West Covina CDJR at the time of writing, among the 52 Gladiators in stock, there’s a Gladiator Sport with a $52,505 MSRP reduced by a dealer discount of $9,506 plus available rebates of $7,876. That’s $17,382 off, resulting in an Internet price of $35,123. A Gladiator Rubicon that starts at $58,655 puts a dealer discount of $8,656 on the hood for a final Internet price of $49,999. That rig and several others like it either don’t show reductions equal to 15% or don’t show any reduction at all, so it’s possible there are more savings to be had if the dealer accept the manufacturer discount.
In our searches, the entry-level Gladiator Sport makes up most of the listings by far — but not all. We found that Koons Tyson CDJR in Virginia has plenty of discounted Gladiators, two Willys 4×4 models each with discounts of more than $12,000. Park Chrysler Jeep in Burnsville, Minnesota lists a brace of Gladiator Rubicons with more than $14,000 each on their hoods. For any interested in this truck, if the 2024 Gladiator didn’t add some feature that you have to have, it’s hard to think of a better time to start scheming how to get a 2023 Gladiator in the driveway.
We think it’s way too early to consider any notion of the Gladiator being canceled, before anyone gets that idea. The inventory figure could be alarming, but that’s a matter of getting production lines running at the appropriate speed. Through the first half of the year, Jeep’s lifestyle-focused midsizer outsold the Ford Ranger, Hyundai Santa Cruz, and GMC Canyon, was barely 100 units behind the Honda Ridgeline, less than 6,000 units behind the Chevrolet Colorado, and less than 7,000 behind the Nissan Frontier. And none of the aforementioned trucks has found a way to bother the Toyota Tacoma, which sold nearly 3.5 times better than the Frontier.
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