Stellantis decided the manual transmission on the Jeep Gladiator wasn’t worth keeping. No press release, no farewell tour, no moment of silence. Just gone, quietly dropped with the 2025 refresh like an embarrassing ex at a company party. The result, entirely unplanned, was handing Toyota a title nobody was competing for: sole surviving pickup truck with a clutch pedal in the American market.
Jeep, to its credit, doesn’t appear thrilled about the situation. At the 60th Easter Jeep Safari, Aamir Ahmed, the brand’s global head of off-road vehicles, let slip a line that did more work than any official press release could: “We have another vehicle that looks like a Wrangler that’s about to get a manual back. Stay tuned”. The Gladiator wasn’t named. It didn’t need to be.
The mechanical case for bringing it back is straightforward. The Gladiator runs a single powertrain option, the 3.6-liter Pentastar V6, good for 285 HP and 260 lb-ft of torque, the very same engine that was already paired with a six-speed manual before the accountants got involved, and the same one still running a stick shift in the Wrangler today.
Ahmed didn’t stop at teasing. He made the functional argument too. The manual Wrangler, combined with 4.88:1 axle gearing, achieves a 100:1 crawl ratio, the kind of mechanical advantage that no automatic transmission replicates with the same raw, immediate physicality.
The broader context has shifted in Jeep’s favor, or at least cleared some of the fog. The plug-in hybrid Gladiator 4xe never made it to market in North America, pulled before launch as Stellantis quietly retreated from its electrification timeline. With that pressure off, the conversation around what a Gladiator actually needs to be has more room to breathe.
Manual transmissions don’t move the volume needle. Jeep knows it. The segment knows it. But the buyers who want one are loud, loyal, and willing to pay, and when the Wrangler Laredo Concept rolled into the Safari with a floor-mounted shifter as a nod to the old CJ lineage, the symbolism was about as subtle as a locker engagement on solid rock.
