Stellantis Belvidere Bet Rises to $800M as Cherokee Slips to 2029

A bigger check and a longer wait

Stellantis has raised its planned investment in the idled Belvidere Assembly Plant in northern Illinois to more than $800 million. The plant will build the next-generation Jeep Cherokee, and the new total is about $200 million more than the figure the company announced in October 2025.25 The extra money comes with a later start date. Pilot production is now expected in the first half of 2028, and retail production of the Cherokee isn't planned until the second half of 2029. Last fall, the company said the plant would restart in 2027.15

The change in vehicle architecture is the main reason for both the higher cost and the delay. The new Cherokee will be the first U.S.-market vehicle built on STLA One, Stellantis's new modular global platform, and Belvidere will be where that platform launches in the United States.13 The company says the plant will be able to build every powertrain version of the Cherokee across two shifts, and it expects at least two STLA One vehicles to be assembled there eventually.110

Coverage agrees on the numbers. It disagrees on how to describe them. Stellantis and Illinois officials present the announcement as a vote of confidence in the state's manufacturing base. Gov. JB Pritzker called it another major endorsement of Illinois workers.39 The Detroit News led with the delay5, and The Auto Wire argued that the extra $200 million "didn't buy speed" but bought time.4 The second reading holds up better. Belvidere is getting a plant built around a new platform, and the price of that is a longer wait.

How the plan kept shrinking

The latest announcement makes more sense against the plant's history since it went dark. Stellantis idled Belvidere in February 2023 after ending production of the previous Cherokee. Reported layoff counts differ: the Chicago Tribune put the last group at 1,200 workers, local outlets cite about 1,300, and other estimates reach 1,350.312 As recently as 2019, the plant employed more than 5,000 people on three shifts.

After the 2023 UAW strike, Stellantis committed nearly $5 billion to retool Belvidere for a new midsize pickup. That plan also included an adjacent EV battery plant and a parts "megahub." In July 2024, the Department of Energy awarded the company about $335 million to convert the plant for electric vehicles.1 Almost none of that plan survived. The midsize truck went to Toledo, the megahub was folded into Detroit, and the battery plant was shelved. A company spokesperson said Stellantis didn't need more battery capacity. Local reporting tied the retreat to slowing EV demand and the end of the federal EV tax credit.13

The October 2025 reset was smaller. Stellantis said it would spend just over $600 million to bring back the Cherokee and the Compass, with about 3,300 jobs and a 2027 launch. That was part of a $13 billion U.S. plan the company described as the largest in its history.14 Some reporting at the time put the figure at $613 million.14 By January 2026, UAW Local 1268 was telling members that company documents pointed to a 2028 relaunch, with retooling starting anywhere from mid-2026 to early 2027.13 In spring, union and company officials toured the plant and began negotiating a launch agreement. The local union president said the facility was in good shape overall but raised concerns about the paint shop.1118

Over nearly three years, the plan has gone from a roughly $5 billion multi-facility complex to a single assembly plant costing more than $800 million. Production of a vehicle that dealers can actually sell has moved from 2027 to late 2029.

Why STLA One drives the timeline

Stellantis introduced STLA One in May as part of its FaSTLAne 2030 strategy. The platform merges five existing architectures into one design that can scale across B, C and D segment vehicles, and the company is targeting cost savings of up to 20%.1 It is expected to underpin more than 30 models and over two million units a year by 2035. Stellantis also wants up to 70% parts reuse across its lineup by 2030.48

For a factory, a platform change means more than a new car design. It sets the stamping dies, joining methods and electrical architecture on the line. STLA One is reported to support 800-volt systems and steer-by-wire.4 Those electronic and electrical requirements explain why a plant built around the old Cherokee can't simply restart. A large part of the line has to be rebuilt.

The risk is that the platform has no production track record. STLA One isn't due to launch anywhere in the world until 2027, so Belvidere will be one of the first plants to build it, with no established line elsewhere to learn from.48 Stellantis says it spent more than $60 million through July 2026 on stamping, body, paint and general assembly work, with more projects continuing through the end of the year.310 Before the upgrades, the stamping operation covered 330,000 square feet and included three automatic transfer presses, a tandem press line and an automatic blanking line.8

The trade-off is reasonable. Restarting Belvidere on the old platform in 2027 would have meant retooling again within a few years. That matters because the current Cherokee only recently returned as a 2026 model, and MotorTrend and Auto123 both note that it is already being replaced.67 Moving straight to STLA One costs more and takes longer, but it gives the plant a product that should stay in production well into the 2030s, if the platform performs as promised.

What happened to the Compass

Reports disagree on the second vehicle. The October 2025 plan named the Compass explicitly. The August announcement says only that Belvidere will build "at least two" STLA One vehicles. The Auto Wire noted that the vaguer wording leaves room for the Compass to be dropped.4 Auto123, citing Automotive News, still expects the Compass to be built in Belvidere. It also says the next-generation Compass program had originally been assigned to Stellantis's plant in Brampton, Ontario, before retooling there stopped in February 2025.7 According to that report, Unifor says Stellantis told the union on Aug. 12 that it intends to discuss a possible sale of the Brampton plant to a buyer outside the auto industry.7

The Auto123 account is the more concrete of the two and is probably the better guide. Even so, Stellantis hasn't named the second vehicle. Brampton's situation also shows the other side of Belvidere's gain: production that comes back to the U.S. is often production another plant loses.

Workers pay in time

The UAW is openly frustrated. Rich Boyer, the union's vice president for the Stellantis department, told members that Belvidere workers "have waited long enough" and that the company owes them certainty and follow-through.5 A presentation to union members late last year showed Compass production starting by December 2027 and the Cherokee by November 2028, with possible combined volumes above 100,000 vehicles a year.5 The new schedule pushes the Cherokee back again.

To soften the delay, Stellantis says it will keep paying supplemental unemployment benefits and healthcare, raise those benefits to match the wage increases in the 2023 contract, address pension credits for laid-off workers, and offer temporary relocation.15 These are real costs on top of the plant investment. Still, if the 2029 date holds, Belvidere will have gone more than six and a half years without building a car for sale.4 One reporting detail adds a labor-relations complication. A spring estimate put the first vehicle off the line around June 2028, a month after the current Stellantis-UAW contract expires.11 Belvidere's future is now likely to come up in the next round of bargaining.

Details of the federal grant are thinner. The $335 million DOE award was meant for EV conversion.1 The August announcement says nothing about whether that money still applies to a plant that will build every powertrain type. Earlier coverage had already questioned whether the funding was safe.15

The wider context

Belvidere is central to Stellantis's attempt to turn its business around. The company plans to invest €60 billion (about $69.7 billion) over five years under FaSTLAne 2030. It wrote off roughly $26 billion in earlier EV commitments in February.1 Its market value has fallen sharply, and in the third quarter Ram outsold Jeep for the first time.17 A competitive, lower-cost compact Jeep built in the U.S. is the kind of product the turnaround depends on.

The $800 million figure is mainly a bet that Stellantis can bring up a new platform in a plant that hasn't built a car in years, and that the savings will make the wait worthwhile. The company is right not to retool twice. Even so, Belvidere's workers have heard several firm-sounding timelines since 2023, and the 2028 pilot build is the first milestone that will show whether this one holds.