To be fair, lets throw some numbers out there so it isn’t such a subjective comment.

To a large degree it depends on how you drive.

Would anyone believe my Miata gets 7 MPG with a stock engine?

It does, because its a race car and on track the engine rarely goes below 6000 RPM.

Before it was a racer, it got 28 MPG or so on the street.

Lets use some numbers. I think 18-20 MPG is reasonable. I can afford it and it doesn’t bother me.

Would I like 30 MPG? Sure, but not if I have to drive a little tiny car, no matter how nice it is once I fold myself into it. And don’t get me started on the misconceptions surrounding crash test ratings….

The 4 door wrangler is the modern Cherokee. The old XJ is just a 4 door wrangler to begin with. It is a crude road car with exceptionally refined capabilities elsewhere. And rear doors.

I have two automotive toys.

One is a Jeep Wrangler. It is an extreme niche vehicle — 100% dedicated to the type of driving for which it was originally designed: off roading.

The other is a Porsche 911. It too is an extreme niche vehicle — and is a wonderful expression of a corner carving road car or track-day sports car.

The Jeep is a crap highway car. I mean, the absolute worst ever. On the open road, it is cruel and unusual punishment. It’s not bad for putting around town on a sunny day with the top down and doors off, however.

The Porsche is death on wheels when the roads get slick. Keeping the back-end behind the headlights can be a puckering experience, indeed. Best keep this on-road tool in the garage on nasty days.

The point is, niche vehicles have a specific place and time when their capabilities come to light.

Wranglers are designed with a specific purpose — to go where other cars cannot. If you have never off-roaded, try it sometime. If your only experience in a Wrangler is on pavement, you’ve missed the entire point.

Likewise, to have driven a 911 on a cold, sleeting day that’s spitting snowflakes is to have missed the entre point of the car (better to have had the Jeep). Find a lonely, twisting road on a clear, dry day and you’ll have a very wide grin on your face when you climb out of the Porsche.

Mr Johnson, borrow that Jeep again as spring thaws, and the mud thickens. Join up with the local Jeep Club for their first excursion of the season (google and you’ll find a group close by – introduce yourself as a journalist doing a review and be prepared to be given a royal treatment by some of the friendliest, most helpful people you may ever have the privilege to meet). Report back to us with a follow-up review. If you do not give the Wrangler five stars after your adventure, along with a deep appreciation for this off-road tool, I will be shocked.

davey49 : I don’t see the point to the 4 door Rubicon as an only car. If you buy a Wrangler as your only vehicle you’re an idiot and should be put away/shot.

I’ve known a few Jeep Wrangler/TJ/YJ owners who didn’t have a second car and they were decent, intelligent people. I don’t think they deserve to die for their automotive taste, nor do I think it made sense for them to buy, store, and insure a second vehicle. It really wasn’t much of a hardship to drive them on road.

I’m not trying to make the Disco sound like a sensible choice. It’s just my choice between the evil of Jeep (been there done that) and the evil of Land Rover (some new masochism to try).

PS I found the 4.0 wasn’t that bad for fuel economy; the numbers being touted for the 3.8 are pretty damn scary. That’s what you would have gotten with the old V8 Cherokees, the 4.0L was damn near efficient by comparison.

My problem with the interior of the current Wranglers is that they are too nice. The YJ, and even the TJ, had a certain utilitarian charm that the JK just doesn’t evoke. Industrial plastics chosen for durability are one thing, poor plastics chosen for cost are another. A Wrangler should have a line of gauges across the dash, and most parts from those gauges, to trim pieces, to headlights and tailights, should be easily replaceable with the most mundane of toolboxes and the most basic set of mechanical skills. I am also a bit wary of such features as power locks, power windows, and AC in Wranglers. The earlier models already had those problems solved – don’t lock it or someone might be tempted to cut through your top to steal something, you don’t have to roll down a window when you can unzip it, and nature makes its own AC if you drive fast enough.

The materials used in this interior are completely adequate. It does not make sense to put soft-touch ANYTHING in this vehicle, *except* for arm rest pads (which it lacks- door and console). My vehicle has all the creature comforts such as power windows, locks, cruise, tilt, A/C. I added heated seat elements to extend the topless driving season here in Michigan.

I am no longer affiliated with Chrysler or Jeep, but am simply a completely satisfied owner.

I do not agree with this writer’s review. He reviewed the vehicle out-of-context.

Do they know about one another? :-)

I appreciate that you at least have some experience with Jeeps off-road. However I do always find the typical media reviews of the Wrangler to be laughable as the writer rarely gets it. They complain about it’s “stiff” ride, lack of refinements, plastic interior, loud tires, and the poor mpg rather then actually getting somewhere where few stock vehicles would go that will put a grin on anyone’s face.

Not to mention the incredible after-market support to take a stock Wrangler from anywhere to weekend warrior to professional rock crawler.

Fortunately Jeep still had the balls to first design the JK Wrangler for off-road use (even if they don’t all see a lot of it).

As an owner of a TJ Wrangler, the Wrangler is the ultimate go anywhere convertible. Here I am with my TJ when it was stock, 10 months after purchase.
http://img232.imageshack.us/img232/588/imogene18ux7.jpg

And this was the view looking down on the Earth.
http://img391.imageshack.us/img391/6788/imogene19tk6.jpg

But really, I guess it doesn’t matter that most people don’t get it. It leaves the back roads to those of us that do. ;)

P.S. Here is a view of a JK Unlimited being put to work:
http://i610.photobucket.com/albums/tt182/dutcher09/DSC00914.jpg

I always get a chuckle from this. The Jeep Wrangler is precisely the kind of vehicle that will rate low on this sort of evaluation. First, it’s a convertible (with a complex manual top), which introduces its own set of problems. Then there’s the 4WD System (again a manual system which requires some basic system understanding to operate). There’s the unique features like the removable doors and hinged windshield, more complexity that other vehicles don’t have.

Then there’s the fact that most Wranglers see much harder use than other vehicles. Aside from recreational off-roading, I’ve driven mine through flooded underpasses, over curbs to avoid traffic jams, in the worst of blizzards, things that would simply kill the average FWD Passenger Car.

Not every vehicle on the retail market needs to be a Honda Civic…

Land Rovers are in the shop more than any car brand on EARTH! All statistics point LR as one of the bottom three for many years in a row. Jeep is ranked quite a bit higher than them. Also, in off-road testing for this new Wrangler, it outperformed all other vehicles (LR usually drops in at 2nd place) and costs 2 to 3 times less.

:)

““It’s a Jeep thing; you wouldn’t understand”. This was the vaguely condescending response I got when I queried my then-girlfriend and current wife about why in the world she would choose such an unrefined and slow mode of transportation.”

Oh, I think people understand, all too well. It’s a supposedly conscious choice where a limited number of Wrangler owners are willing to sacrifice reliability and acceptable driving dynamics for a lifestyle perpetuated by clever marketing. IOW, just another domestic niche vehicle.

As previously pointed out, many customers that are lured in by the freewheeling, independent Wrangler ‘lifestyle’ find out very quickly that a Wrangler is in no way an acceptable, everyday vehicle and get rid of it the first chance they get.

What’s puzzling is how Chrysler can expect to stay in business where their most successful product has such a limited (albeit loyal, to a fault) market. This seems like the same sort of lingering hubris that got Detroit in trouble decades ago when they took the domestic market for granted and foisted shoddy (but well advertised) products on the public, confident it would go on forever.

FWIW, Consumer Reports rates the Jeep Wrangler as the overall worst new vehicle today, rating it poorly in all categories except, of course, off-road ability. I guess they ‘just don’t understand’, either.

Don’t like the JK Unlimited so much – looks too long (probably kills the maneuverability) and I can’t stand that they purged the last of the AMC heritage from the vehicle.

We have a 98 Wrangler. It has been reasonably reliable (fried the coils once, and needed a new radiator at about 80,000 miles), but all of the other comments about these vehicles’ shortcomings are completely true. For me, the worst thing is the deafening wind noise on the highway with the soft top. So, on long trips, we take the Passat instead. This car is for in-town commuting, top-down jaunts to the lake, and also trips to field sites for work.

So yeah, it’s a stupid car. Yet we love it. In fact, I have never developed this level of affection for any car. Can’t explain it…it’s a Jeep thing, I guess.

And I would be all over the new Unlimited, if it weren’t for the horrendous gas mileage. It’s not a money issue – I don’t rack up big miles, and can afford to fuel any car on the market. For me, it’s a social conscience issue. Ten years ago I was okay with it, but these days sitting in one of these gas hogs I just feel like a carbon piggy. From that standpoint, they are obscene.

In Europe, you can buy one of these with a diesel. Seems a natural fit to me. Not sure why we are not allowed to buy them here.

If I’m going to have a fuel sucking, slug slow, in-the-shop-more-often-than-on-the-road off road vehicle, I at least want some style, a comfy interior, and some half-decent road manners.

And yes, I have owned a Jeep. Horrible thing, but it made it to 300 odd thousand kms without blowing up (everything except the 4.0L, the transmission and the diffs was broken, though).

I would never want to have a traditional (CJ/YJ/TJ/JK) Jeep as my only car or daily driver. They are great summer cars though.

With regards to the ‘It’s a Jeep Thing’, the Harley reference is perhaps the most on point. Yes, there are other offroad capable SUVs, some of which you can even take the top off of, just as there are other cruiser/chopper/chromed-out-vtwin bikes, but none have the same feel. I can’t explain why driving with the top down in a bouncy vinyl clad anachronism is so much fun, but it just is. Maybe it’s the waves you get from other Jeep owners, maybe it’s driver’s seating position almost halfway back the vehicle in the two door version, or maybe it’s just a psychological image thing, but Wranglers are fun, despite a list of cons twice as long as the list of pros for almost any driver.

Having said that, this vehicle reminds me of when I tried to use my SCCA IT car as a daily driver for a while. With full race suspension and 650 pound springs, 5 point harness, 103dB exhaust, etc. The car was incredibly capable on track, but was completely overkill for the road and not very pleasant for commuting.

I think that this Jeep would be just as useless as a commuter. It’s a one trick pony basically. It does that one trick well, but it’s not good at on-road travel where it would spend 95% of its life.