Stellantis Sold You a Lie Calling It “9-Speed”

The Non-Financial Ledger

Picture a small business owner. Maybe they run a delivery operation, a catering company, a mobile service crew. They need a reliable van. They’re not buying it for fun — this is a working vehicle, a capital investment, something that has to earn its keep every single day it leaves the lot.

They walk into a dealership and they see the pitch: a nine-speed automatic transmission. They’ve done their homework. More gears means lower engine RPM at highway speeds. Lower RPM means less fuel burned, less engine stress, longer vehicle life. For a van that racks up 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 miles a year, those savings compound into real money. The math makes sense. They sign the papers.

What Stellantis never told them — what was buried inside proprietary software they had no way to inspect or audit — is that the gears they paid for were never going to show up. The van would never, under any real driving condition, shift into eighth or ninth gear. The software was written to prevent it. The aerodynamics of the vehicle made it impossible. Stellantis knew this before the first one rolled off the lot.

So the small business owner drives their new van. It feels like their old van. It burns fuel like their old van. Because it performs like their old van. They paid thousands extra for something they cannot see, cannot feel, and cannot use — because it doesn’t exist outside of Stellantis’s marketing materials.

The betrayal here is specific. These are commercial buyers. They run margins. They track fuel costs. They depreciate assets. They made a documented financial decision based on a spec sheet that was a lie. And the company that sold them that lie had access to every test result, every gear ratio, every software parameter that proved it. They chose not to share it. They chose the sale.

Legal Receipts

The complaint quotes and cites Stellantis’s own marketing, then lays the documented technical reality directly alongside it. Here is what the record shows.

“When is a nine-speed automatic transmission really only a seven-speed? When it is installed in a 2022 or 2023 Ram Promaster van… As a practical matter, the Class Vehicle is too slow to ever activate the 8th and 9th gear. So in reality, the van only has seven useable gears.”

— Complaint, Paragraph 1, Gonzalez v. FCA US LLC, Case 2:26-cv-04407 (C.D. Cal., filed April 24, 2026)

• This opening paragraph of the complaint frames the entire fraud: the transmission as physically installed has nine mechanical gear positions, but the vehicle’s own software prohibits engagement of the top two. The van’s size and aerodynamic profile make conditions for those gears unreachable in real-world driving.
• The complaint’s framing is important: the defect is not a mechanical failure. It is an intentional software restriction. This is a programmed limitation, not a broken part.

“The Class Vehicle’s design is too big and boxy, and thus the Class Vehicle’s software will never detect a situation in which engaging those gears is beneficial to its performance. As a result, the Class Vehicle functionally only has a seven-speed transmission, not the advertised nine-speed.”

— Complaint, Paragraph 7

• This paragraph establishes that the limitation was not discovered after the fact. It is a design characteristic. Stellantis built a van too large to use its top two gears, and then programmed those gears out of service, and then marketed the full nine-gear count anyway.
• The logical sequence here matters: Stellantis first built the vehicle, then determined it couldn’t use 8th and 9th gear, then chose software suppression instead of a redesign or an honest spec sheet.

“Stellantis’s advertising and representations about this aspect of the Class Vehicles were uniform and consistent. All stated, without any qualification, that the Class Vehicles had a ‘9-Speed Automatic Transmission.’ None disclosed that the Class Vehicles were programmed to not engage their eighth or ninth gears under any use circumstances.”

— Complaint, Paragraph 25

• “Without any qualification” is a legally significant phrase. It establishes that Stellantis had multiple opportunities across multiple advertising channels — TV commercials, website, brochures, press releases, and the owner’s manual itself — to include a disclosure. They included none.
• The owner’s manual is particularly notable. A buyer who actually read the manual cover to cover would still have been told they owned a nine-speed vehicle. The deception extended into post-purchase documentation.

“Defendants’ wrongful actions and inactions were done deliberately and with intent to defraud. Defendants’ wrongful actions and inactions were done in part to enrich itself at the expense of consumers and gain commercial advantage over competitors.”

— Complaint, Paragraph 66

• The complaint explicitly alleges intent to defraud, not negligence or oversight. This matters for damages: if intent is established at trial, punitive damages become available on top of compensatory relief.
• The “commercial advantage over competitors” language is a direct accusation that Stellantis used the false nine-speed claim to compete more favorably against other commercial van manufacturers, distorting the market for every buyer who compared specs across brands.

Public Deception: What You Were Told vs. What Was True

Stellantis broadcast the nine-speed claim across every customer-facing surface simultaneously, creating a consistent false impression that the company knew was contradicted by its own engineering data.

• Claimed: The 2022 Ram Promaster features a “New 9-Speed Automatic Transmission” representing an upgrade from the six-speed of previous models. Reality: The 8th and 9th gears are software-blocked and never engage under any real-world driving conditions. The van functionally operates as a seven-speed.
• Claimed: The higher gears “help lower engine rpm speeds,” delivering the fuel efficiency and reduced engine stress associated with more gear selections. Reality: The seventh gear’s ratio (0.70) is nearly identical to the prior model’s sixth gear (0.65), a difference of only 0.05. The complaint states that top speed, acceleration, engine speed, and fuel economy are “likewise almost the exact same” as the previous six-gear model.
• Claimed: The nine-speed spec was advertised via press releases, TV commercials, the company website, product brochures, point-of-sale advertising, and the owner’s manual. Reality: None of these materials included any disclosure that two of the nine advertised gears were locked out by software and would never be used.
• Claimed: The price increase over the 2021 model — up to $6,070 more per vehicle based on MSRP ranges — was justified by the transmission upgrade and the performance improvements it would deliver. Reality: The complaint alleges the vehicles performed substantially identically to the models they replaced, meaning buyers paid a premium for a specification that delivered no measurable benefit.

Profit-Maximization at All Costs

The complaint is explicit about the financial motive: Stellantis knew that more gears meant more money, engineered a vehicle that couldn’t use the extra gears, then sold the full nine-speed count to capture the premium price.

• The 2022 nine-speed model’s MSRP ranged from $37,260 to $48,900. The 2021 six-speed model ranged from $31,300 to $42,830. The price gap was up to $6,070 per vehicle, directly tied to the transmission upgrade claim.
• Stellantis sold approximately 60,937 Class Vehicles in the United States in 2022 alone. The complaint notes the class encompasses millions of vehicles nationwide across 2022 and 2023 model years.
• The complaint states that revenue attributable to Class Vehicles sold on the basis of the false advertising “amounts to tens of millions of dollars.” This figure appears in the California False Advertising Law cause of action (Paragraph 190).
• The complaint alleges the fraud was designed to “gain commercial advantage over competitors” — meaning Stellantis used a false spec to outcompete other commercial van manufacturers in a market where fuel efficiency and transmission specs are material purchase criteria.
• Rather than redesign the vehicle so it could actually use all nine gears, or disclose the limitation honestly, the complaint alleges Stellantis chose the cheapest option: software suppression of the unused gears, with no consumer notice.

Regulatory Gray Zones: The Spec Sheet Loophole

Auto manufacturers are not federally required to disclose which gears their transmission’s software will actually permit to engage. That gap is precisely what the complaint alleges Stellantis walked through.

• There is no federal regulation that requires an automaker to disclose, in its marketing or owner documentation, that specific gear positions are software-blocked. Stellantis was technically able to count all nine mechanical gear positions on the spec sheet, because the gears physically exist in the hardware. The software restriction is invisible to any pre-purchase inspection.
• Consumer protection law — the legal framework that actually applies here — requires that representations be accurate and not misleading. The complaint argues that advertising nine gears, when two can never be used, violates California’s Consumer Legal Remedies Act (Cal. Civ. Code § 1750), False Advertising Law (Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 17500), and Unfair Competition Law (Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 17200), as well as federal warranty law under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act (15 U.S.C. § 2301).
• The gray zone is the gap between hardware specifications and functional software behavior. Automakers set their own transmission software parameters. No third-party certification or regulatory disclosure requirement forced Stellantis to publish the fact that its software excluded two of the nine advertised gears from operation.