Stellantis Fleet’s new Pro One–aligned strategy delivers growth under Michael Ferreira

DETROIT—Michael Ferreira has led Stellantis’ U.S. fleet sales division as the senior vice president since April. He sat down with a group of fleet and automotive journalists to share his plans for the division and what the industry can expect from Stellantis fleet offerings moving forward.

Offering clarity on Stellantis’ new fleet approach isn’t valuable only to the journalists on the call or the commercial buyers they write for, but also something one could argue has been needed within the company for quite some time.

The company’s Detroit-based competitors have placed a strong emphasis on their fleet business, with Ford championing the initiative with its Ford Pro division and General Motors’ two-year-old commercial division, GM Envolve. And with Ferreira at the helm, Stellantis looks to bring more clarity for its fleet customers as well. 

For Ferreira, this meant bringing together critical fleet customer components.

“We have the components needed to be successful, but they were loose-standing entities,” Ferreira said of his first decisions made as SVP of Stellantis fleet sales. “As soon as we brought them together in terms of our value proposition, things started to change.”

What changed was a 22% year-over-year increase in third-quarter fleet sales.

Here’s how Ferreira made that happen.

How Stellantis Fleet’s restructuring aligns U.S. operations with Pro One 

Ferreira’s first objective with Stellantis Fleet was to restructure and reframe its U.S. market strategy to align more with Stellantis’ global fleet strategy, known as Stellantis Pro One. Pro One is “highly successful” in Europe, Ferreira said, with 30% market share among commercial sales, compared with Stellantis Fleet’s 12% market share in the North American market.

Aligning Stellantis Fleet in North America with Pro One’s global strategy required the creation of a new “ecosystem” for Stellantis Fleet customers, bringing all Stellantis products and services under one roof for the commercial customer, Ferreira explained, which includes the product, the upfit, and vehicle connectivity.

“What we tried to do from a mission point of view was to become a customer-centric and focused fleet organization,” Ferreira said. “We wanted to provide our customers with a bigger and better freedom of choice when it comes to Stellantis vehicles and also combine some of the value proposition that we had in place already.”

Next was to build market share in specific segments. Ferreira and his team initially focused on rental and self-managed fleets. To increase the value proposition for these segments, the goal was to show Stellantis can fully support the customer with data, safety, and a reduced total cost of ownership.

“We have a platform called Connected Fleet, which is utilized for self-managed fleets, where they can get optics onto the vehicle,” Ferreira said. “But that also gave us the opportunity to focus on our data ... where we can feed and forward our dealers some of the fleet opportunities [in terms of] repairs, maintenance, etcetera.”

This strategy—connecting vehicles to their fleet managers and vehicles to the dealer—is part of Ferreira’s overall strategy for Stellantis Fleet.

Expanding fleet flexibility with unified product lines, upfit options, and powertrain choices

The main goal of the new Stellantis Fleet strategy, according to Ferreira, is to provide a better value proposition to its current customers. This means removing product silos and offering a more unified experience for fleets that employ—or wish to employ—vehicles from multiple Stellantis brands. Part of that freedom of choice includes a variety of product offerings.

“We want to make sure that we can offer and deliver vehicles that are suitable ... whether it's gas, diesel, electric, or hybrid, for that matter, for the specific market segment,” Ferreira said.

Along with improving the customer experience is improving customer support, and Ferreira assured that improvements are well underway, with an expansion of the Stellantis support team. The expanded team will consist of roles in product support as well as data support to ensure fleet customers are tapping into all Stellantis Fleet has to offer.

Integrating the global Pro One blueprint to streamline vehicle delivery, upfit, and lifecycle management

While connectivity is important, that’s only one half of the strategy Ferreira hopes to use to gain market share with Stellantis vehicles. The other half is the alignment with Stellantis’ global fleet strategy, Pro One.

“Stellantis Pro One is specifically focusing on the vehicle—both the vehicle shipment [and] the vehicle upfit component—and then also the vehicle-to-the-customer delivery process, and then the retention and replacement cycle component of that fleet vehicle,” Ferreira said.

One thing the team noticed in the rental segment when selling model year 2026 vehicles was that some customers had not ordered a vehicle since model year 2024. Ferreira said they were able to go to these customers with the new value proposition gained from the revamped Stellantis Fleet offerings, which include the capture and access of vehicle data, the upfit component, and connectivity, and immediately gain new sales. This led to a 22% year-over-year increase in sales.

Leveraging connected-fleet data to lower TCO and accelerate AV development

Additionally, collecting all this data is valuable not only for rental fleets and self-managed fleets, but it also helps Stellantis future-proof its operations. Its collaborations with autonomous vehicle software developer Nvidia, Uber, electric vehicle developer Foxconn, and partnerships with robotaxi companies are reflections of this, Ferreira said, as the company looks to eventually develop Level 4 autonomous vehicles.

Ferreira said that technology will be what drives Stellantis Fleet forward, but it’s the focus on the current and future customers that will help Stellantis get there.