The Complete Cost Of Maintaining A Chrysler

When you’re in the market for a new or used mid-range Chrysler, you’ll eventually wonder what a Chrysler generally costs in terms of maintenance. In this blog, we’ve done our absolute best to give you a complete rundown of the costs and what you can expect for different models and model years. Let’s start with a quick answer:

Chryslers are slightly more expensive to own than other car brands. On average, a Chrysler costs $608 per year in maintenance which is marginally less than the $646 average. However, Chrysler mainly makes sedans and minivans, which should be much cheaper to maintain. Therefore, they underperform compared to other brands that mainly make these car types.

However, that certainly doesn’t tell the whole story. Below, we’ll start by looking at the annual maintenance cost of the most popular models and their corresponding model years. We’ll also compare the annual maintenance cost of a Chrysler to 24 other car brands and discuss why a Chrysler is considered cheap or expensive in maintenance. Read on!

How Expensive Are Chrysler Models To Maintain?

First of all, we feel it’s essential to have a clear understanding of how much each model, and different model years of that model, cost per year in terms of maintenance. For this, we’ve used combined data of Repairpal and Caredge. We’ve compiled this data in the table below.

As you can see, we’ve been able to collect the data for three important Chrysler models. We would have liked to include the Voyager as well, but this car only recently started production again. Furthermore, we do not have data for Chrysler 200 in the past years because this car stopped production in 2017.

What we can see below is that 5+-year-old Chryslers tend to have maintenance costs in the $500 – $700 per year category. This is surprising given that the 200 and 300 are sedans, which generally end up cheaper than many SUVs or trucks; however, not in the case of Chrysler. Especially older models of the Chrysler 300 don’t seem to do all that well, and that’s because they’ve had a range of problems that we discussed earlier.

Also, the Pacifica has quite a high maintenance cost for a relatively young car. However, this is because the Pacifica is a minivan and, because they have a large size and drive many miles, their maintenance costs tend to be higher.

Are Chrysler More Or Less Expensive To Maintain Compared To Other Brands?

We also feel it’s good to get an overall understanding of the maintenance costs of cars in the United States. By comparing 25 car brands, which we’ve done below, we get a clear image of how expensive or cheap a Chrysler really is to maintain.

We found that Chrysler ends up on a shared tenth place in terms of how high the maintenance costs for this car are. For reference, the higher the car brand is up on the list, the lower the cost. A tenth place could therefore be considered quite good. Keep in mind that this is average maintenance costs, not the cost if something were to go wrong with the vehicle, such as damage to the transmission, which can be significantly more expensive. This is why it’s so critical to choose a reliable vehicle.

However, we have to take a few things into account here. First of all, Chrysler shares a spot with Buick; we already talked about the maintenance cost of a Buick in this blog. What we saw there is that Buick, at this point in time, mainly sells compact, mid-size, and full-size SUVs. SUVs tend to have higher than average maintenance costs.

On the other hand, Chrysler mainly sells sedans (200 and 300) and minivans (Pacifica and Voyager). The fact that the maintenance costs for the 200 and 300 are on the higher end doesn’t speak in favor of the built quality of these sedans. The costs for a Pacifica are higher than average and comparable to that of the Buick SUVs, but this is to be expected.

Therefore, we would say that Chrysler is slightly more expensive than average. Especially if you consider that there are many sedans on the market that are built by Asian manufacturers that are much less expensive in terms of maintenance.

Why Are Chrysler Expensive To Maintain?

By now, we’ve established that Chrysler is slightly more expensive than average to maintain; however, why is this so? As said, the Pacifica is a larger car, and the maintenance costs for this car aren’t outrageously expensive. However, the main culprit in Chryslers’ story is the 300 model.

Chrysler only sells a few models these days as vehicles like the Town and Country are no longer being produced and the 300 is undoubtedly their main one. However, both the first and a large part of the second generation have had many substantial problems. These include issues with the gearbox design, warping of the door panels when exposed to higher temperatures, and significant issues with the infotainment system.

With all of these problems, Chrysler has been incredibly slow with actually fixing them. This meant that many people have looked for private solutions which increase the maintenance cost substantially (instead of having it repaired under a form of warranty because Chrysler didn’t offer one for the problems). Because of this, we’ve established in this blog that the 2017 model is most likely your best bet.

Furthermore, Chryslers are manufactured entirely in Detroit. This means they don’t have the labor and cost advantages that many Asian brands have (which is why Asian brands are much cheaper to maintain, as can be seen in the earlier discussed table). Buick has the same problem, so they are equally expensive to maintain.

Sources

• https://caredge.com/chrysler
• https://repairpal.com/chrysler/

Stefan K.

Hi! My name is Stefan; I’m the owner and lead writer at TheDriverAdviser.com.

I’m an active writer on this blog myself, as well as a novice car mechanic. For the really technical stuff, I find writers with experience as a mechanic or who have studied mechanical engineering.

Read more about our fantastic team on our about page!