When news of Fiat and Chrysler’s planned merger broke in the early part of the prior decade, the jokes pretty much wrote themselves. Though each company had its flashes of brilliance, neither has necessarily been renowned for build quality or reliability over the years. It’s with that legacy that I present to you this post, courtesy of the endless well of amusing automotive content on r/justrolledintotheshop, showing what looks like a Jeep Compass in the midst of an identity crisis.
According to our OP, the customer brought this Compass in complaining that the “radio display is incorrect.” That’s a pretty vague description of the problem, though fortunately, it wouldn’t take a tech very long to figure out what the owner meant. The infotainment screen immediately displays Fiat’s logo on startup, rather than Jeep’s.
On one level, it isn’t difficult to understand how something like this is possible. Jeep and Fiat both belong to Fiat Chrysler, now Stellantis, and their products both use the group’s Uconnect infotainment platform. (That’s setting aside the fact that the Compass, Renegade, and 500X all used to share an assembly line.) Compare the software of vehicles from two different Stellantis brands built around the same timeframe, and there’s a strong likelihood that they’ll look almost identical, save for some basic changes to colors and fonts. You know, light theming to suit the marque in question.
Still, I’ve never gotten into my mom’s Hyundai Elantra and seen it throw up the Kia logo, and she’s put something like 120,000 miles on that thing. This isn’t exactly common, even among groups of carmakers that share software to the degree that Stellantis brands do. I tried to dig up examples of other owners reporting similar behavior, and I did come across one: a Jeep Cherokee that thought it was an SRT Cherokee. Honestly, I would’ve just let that be.
Most other cases seem to involve modifications, like this 2017 Cherokee owner who swapped in a newer, better Uconnect system from a 2019 car and found their SUV displaying the Alfa Romeo badge. Now, I’m sure those of you reading this who have worked at dealer service departments have seen your share of, shall we say, inadvisable behavior when it comes to vehicle mods. You have perhaps already formed your own conclusions about what happened here, and maybe you’re right.
Although I owned a Dart a decade ago, I’m not active in the Uconnect jailbreaking community. Still, from what I can gather, a wrong move in the AlfaOBD diagnostic software can make one Stellantis brand’s car present the logo of another.
Maybe this Compass owner got in over their head, or maybe it was a genuine glitch. In either case, the tech tending to the Jeep said a quick relearn procedure set everything right. Now what I’d really love to see is a new Charger that thinks it’s an Opel.
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Backed by a decade of covering cars and consumer tech, Adam Ismail is a Senior Editor at The Drive, focused on curating and producing the site’s slate of daily stories.
