In Defense Of: The Jeep Patriot

Editor’s Note: Please welcome Matt Pericles, a.k.a. FormerFF, as the first reader featured during TTAC’s Reader Submission week. We’ll post more submissions throughout the week. Stay tuned!

Consider the Jeep Patriot, whipping boy of automotive journalists everywhere, number 18 out of 18 in U.S. News’s “ Best Compact SUVs” list.

Does it deserve such scorn?

How did I wind up with one of America’s lowest rated vehicles on my driveway?

Not too long ago, I was shopping for a late-model used car for my daughters to drive. In my mind, the right car for a teenaged girl is a compact sedan. But I am not a teenaged girl. To my dismay, I found that Crossover Madness had infected my household, claiming both of my daughters and my wife, so a-crossover shopping we went.

As you can imagine, getting two teenagers plus one mom to agree on a car is not the easiest of tasks.

Daughter Two, who is still a year away from getting her learner’s permit, was leaning toward the Escape, but she wasn’t that interested in making a choice. My wife had developed a thing for Subarus, but prices of the all-wheel-drive machines weren’t very favorable, and my youngest said, “No teenaged girl wants a Subaru.” Daughter One, only two months away from her license, saw a CR-V online, which she liked and wanted to check out, necessitating a stop at the local Honda dealer. Once at the Honda store, she rather quickly decided she didn’t like the CR-V, and I can’t say I blame her. While it’s a very nice vehicle, it’s also more of a mom-mobile than a righteous teen ride

Down the street we went to CarMax to see what it had. As it turns out, CarMax has pretty much everything, and we sat in everything.

Daughter One gravitated to the Patriot much to my dismay. I’ve read the reviews, and I know they say it’s not good. It’s not a vehicle I’d have put on my list, but I felt I owed it to my daughter to give it a test drive, which we did. I was prepared to dislike it rather a lot. As you can probably guess, I didn’t dislike it at all. That’s how we wound up buying a Jeep Patriot.

I come not to bury the Patriot, but to praise it

Let’s start on the outside. The first thing I noticed was the Patriot’s size. At 173 inches in length, it’s 7 or so inches shorter than most of compact crossovers the motoring press compares it to, and 4 or 5 inches longer than the average subcompact crossover. It’s also a little shorter and a couple of inches narrower than most compacts, about the same width as the subcompacts. Part of the Patriot’s height comes from its 8 inches of ground clearance, which is on the upper side of the range for CUVs in this size range. It also looks like a Jeep, and nothing else. You could remove all the badging and the majority of drivers would be able to instantly identify it as a Jeep.

Open the driver’s door and have a seat. The dash is austere, but well put together. The controls are straightforward and easy to use. The instrument panel consists of fuel, speedometer, tachometer, and coolant temperature gauges, in a simple, legible format. The front seats are comfortable and spacious. Ours are cloth, and the center part of the seat is made of a grippy material that keeps you in place. Headroom is generous, but the windshield is not overly large. It’s more upright and closer to the driver than most of the recent cars I’ve driven. Add all this together and you have a comfortable cockpit with a bit of a vintage car feel. Ours has an aftermarket stereo with a backup camera, so I can’t comment on the factory infotainment setup.

Step out and open one of the back doors. They’re not very wide in and of themselves, but they open wide to make ingress and egress easy. The back seat is as comfortable as the front — at least for two — and offers plenty of legroom. I wouldn’t recommend the middle back seat for long trips, but that’s true of any vehicle in this class. There’s also a reasonable amount of cargo space for a vehicle of this size, and if you’re carrying more stuff than people, the back seat has a split-folding feature.

Time to drive. Put the key in the slot, turn to the start position, and crank. The starter motor efforts ignition for as long as it needs to, which is not long, and the much-maligned World engine starts and immediately settles to a smooth idle. Grab the shifter, put the also much-maligned CVT in Drive, and get ready to go.

I say get ready to go, because it takes about a second for the transmission to engage once you’ve moved the shift lever, so keep your foot on the brake for a beat. Depressing the accelerator a little spins up the engine to 2,000 rpm quickly, and stays there during initial acceleration.

For a typical suburban drive where the travel speed is 35 to 45 mph, as you reach your cruising speed and back off of the throttle, the engine slows to 1,600 rpm or so, depending on load. Like most cars these days, the drivetrain is tuned for economy, and it takes a firm press of the pedal to get the Patriot to hurry. I’ve floored it exactly once. The engine spun up to 5,000 rpm quickly and pulled nicely once it got there.

The run up to 5,000 rpm took less time than would a conventional automatic to do its downshifting, particularly for one of the newer autoboxes with six or more gears.

There’s no particular drama from the engine bay during a full throttle run, but you will be treated to a bit of torque steer. The Patriot comes equipped with a somewhat large and thick rimmed steering wheel. The steering is a little less boosted that what you may be used to, and seems a bit slower than most other recent cars I’ve driven. Bend it into a turn and it responds pretty much as you’d expect, but a little extra turn of the wheel is needed to point you where you want to go. The steering isn’t particularly sharp or precise, but this is a Jeep, and slicing up apexes is not high on its list of priorities.

Out on the highway, the blocky shape and upright windshield combine to generate wind noise, but it’s not intrusive. You can also expect it to return a couple of miles per gallon less than one would with one of the more aerodynamic entries in this class.

It’s not for everyone. Could it be for you? Many years ago, I worked for a small-town new car dealership. One day, we took an elderly AMC Gremlin in on trade. The used car manager was looking it over, and I came up to him and remarked that I thought it would be a tough sell. The used car manager, who was never one to shy away from a challenge and also was never at a loss for words, looked me in the eye and said, “Son, there’s an ass for every seat.”

He did wind up selling that Gremlin, and I never again questioned if any used car would sell. Truly, there is an ass for every seat. So, whose buttocks should the Patriot’s roomy front seats cradle?

First and foremost, the Patriot is a Jeep, and an inexpensive one at that. It skews more towards utilitarian than luxurious, simplistic versus sophisticated. It’s not a capacious mom-mobile like the RAV4 or the Rogue, and isn’t urbane and sleek like the Escape or Hyundai/Kia offerings. Think of it as the good-natured country cousin of this family.

It exudes a fun, funky, outdoorsy vibe that seems to be irresistible to teenagers; it seems like half of the ones I know would like a Patriot. And you know what? It’s probably the ideal teenager car. It’s not fast in a straight line, it’s doesn’t encourage aggressive driving, and it’s not going to make a young driver want to go out and see how fast he can get around the local Dead Man’s Curve. In addition, I’d think there would be a lot of young singles and couples that would enjoy the Patriot. Our Patriot is what my eldest will take with her when she’d done with her schooling, and I can certainly picture her loading it up with two or three friends and heading for the beach. If you’re so inclined, the Patriot can be equipped for some fairly serious offroading at a realistic price.

I enjoy driving ours, I think it’s fun to drive, and I think it captures the intent of “Sport Utility” much better than nearly all of its competitors. There’s a certain honesty and playfulness about it that I don’t see in many cars these days, and its low purchase price doesn’t hurt. I like it, my daughters like it, and all of the other parents (and their teens) who I know that I’ve shown it to like it. It’s not for everyone, but what car is? As far as I’m concerned, the Patriot has gotten a bum rap from the motoring press. No, it’s not all that good of a CR-V, but it’s a pretty good Jeep Patriot.