"If you put sales of Liberty and Nitro together, it's doing what we want it to do," Mr. Landry said while discussing the poor August sales of the two vehicles.

"As we move toward 2012, we won't have this dual branding," Mr. Landry said, citing a previously announced effort to scale back the automaker's offerings. "That's when we'll just come back with one branded body of those particular vehicles, instead of two."

Experts generally expect the Nitro would be the vehicle to be dumped and, in the past, said they anticipated it would happen before 2012.