QOTD: What's Your '20-Year Game' Vehicle of Choice?

Spending pre-internet years living in a place where everything worth seeing, doing, or buying was an hour away, necessity dictated the invention of games to stave off boredom during yet another mind-numbing trip to civilization. Games of “Count the Potholes” were always popular, but the most creative was the “20-Year Game.” Here’s how to play:

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Jeep Grand Wagoneer Reportedly on Hold as FCA Figures Out How Exactly to Do This

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has high hopes for the upcoming Jeep Grand Wagoneer and its ability to challenge Range Rover and Mercedes-Benz for premium SUV buyers. The proposed model’s $140,000 price ceiling keeps FCA execs up at night in giddy anticipation.

However, there’s a problem: Before FCA hoists that sparkling and lucrative cherry atop its Jeep sundae, it first needs to build the damn thing, and that’s easier said than done.

Which is why the Grand Wagoneer — the three-row ultra-lux SUV that Lee Iacocca could only dream of — is on hold.

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The JK Wrangler's Swan Song is a Cacophony

Jeep’s JK has been around for a decade, and its parent company is now doing everything in its power to maintain consumer interest in the outgoing model before the next-generation JL shows up next year. While offering limited edition vehicles has become a time-honored tradition for Jeep, this send-off for the current Wrangler is ridiculous.

The company will offer as many as twelve “special” editions of the Wrangler over the next handful of months.

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Jeep Dishes on Trackhawk Debut as It Ponders Wrangler Unveiling

Jeep is spanning the performance gamut these days. On one end of the spectrum there is the emblematic Wrangler and its steadfast off-road prowess, with a next-generation model on the way. On the other is the upcoming Trackhawk, with all the on-road performance a juiced-up, tarmac-tuned SUV can give.

Both vehicles are highly anticipated and, while we may not know all of what we’re waiting for, we at least know how long we’ll have to bide our time.

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2017 Jeep Compass: Pointing in the Right Direction

Our esteemed Managing Editor doesn’t exactly hand out Lifetime Achievement Awards like Tic-Tacs, so when he does, we know he’s serious. The previous generation Compass was widely (and rightfully) derided for its faux-off-road pretensions and Playskool interior. It wasn’t just TTAC who knocked the thing in recent years; buff books piled on, too.

For FCA, the Jeep brand is essentially a license to print money. All of its models are doing well, even the Compass which, in the U.S., is on its way to having its best sales year since it was introduced a decade ago. Yes, you read that correctly. Armed with that knowledge, and the current hot-as-fire compact crossover segment, one can scarcely imagine the sales gains they will make with this, the handsome new Compass.

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Range-topping Jeep Grand Wagoneer to Get a Hybrid Version, Possibly a Plug-in

We’ve seen some early images, and we know that Fiat Chrysler Automobiles feels the upcoming Jeep Wagoneer could warrant a price tag of up to $140,000.

What the folks at Jeep aren’t exactly sure of is how diverse they want the brand’s flagship SUV to be when it rolls out, likely as a 2019 model. One this is for sure — a model that exclusive likely needs some electrification, and Jeep brand chief Mike Manley knows it.

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Across The Block: Carlisle Auctions, Lakeland, Florida

Well, that didn’t go as planned. Though, working from a baseball analogy, batting .250 isn’t too bad. More on last week’s picks later — on to the new stuff in sunny Florida!

For years, Carlisle has been shorthand for a series of massive swap meets in a central Pennsylvania town. I’ve not had the pleasure of a Carlisle event yet, but I’m imagining a million-acre orgy of rusty cars and parts. In other words, heaven.

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FCA Needs To Find The Hill Descent Control Button: Jeep Sales Slid Downhill Again In October

After ending a 35-month streak of improved U.S. sales with a 3-percent year-over-year decline in September, Jeep volume slid 7 percent in October 2016, the second consecutive month of decline for the previously white-hot SUV brand.

Jeep’s best-selling Cherokee recorded the most significant plunge in October 2016, falling 23 percent from year-ago levels to rank third in Jeep sales. Only the Grand Cherokee, quickly becoming Jeep’s top seller, and the departing Patriot posted October improvements.

Jeep, so often the engine behind FCA’s growth when Chrysler, Dodge, and Fiat have struggled, was instead partly to blame for FCA’s 10-percent October decline.

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Consumer Reports Crowns FCA as the Four Least Reliable Brands Available

Consumer Reports released its new car reliability ratings today, and one company should take a long hard look at itself in the Italian-American mirror.

The annual report covers brand reliability and includes a list of the 10 best, and worst, vehicles in terms of reliability. While there are some predicable favorites, Buick managed to hit an unexpected home run and electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla surprised everyone with reports of mechanical issues stemming from — get this — the electronics.

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America's 10 Top SUV Sellers In 2016's First Three-Quarters

After 35 consecutive months of year-over-year sales improvements, including an all-time monthly record of 90,545 reported sales in May 2016, Jeep’s streak came to an end in September 2016. Last month, U.S. Jeep volume slid 3 percent because of declines across much of the brand’s lineup.

Yet Jeep continues to sell more SUVs and crossovers than any other automotive brand in America, topping second-ranked Ford by 118,328 sales through the first three-quarters of 2016.

Together, Jeep, Ford, Toyota, Chevrolet, and Honda — the five highest-volume purveyors of SUVs/crossovers in the United States — own 52 percent of America’s utility vehicle market. That leaves less than half the available utility vehicle sales for more than 25 brands to divvy up.

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Here's Your First Look at the Jeep Grand Wagoneer (and More of the 2018 Wrangler)

The story goes that someone at a recent Fiat Chrysler Automobiles dealer meeting acted quickly when the automaker flashed images of future Jeep models across the screen.

While FCA hasn’t given the public so much as a hint of what the upcoming, range-topping Jeep looks like, we now have a better idea, all thanks to that person’s quick-draw camera. Oh, and there’s plenty of 2018 Wrangler details to gleam, too.

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Jeep, No Longer Unstoppable, Wants to Fix Its Game in an Overlooked Market

After posting sales gains that most automakers would sell their souls for, Jeep’s skyrocketing climb hit the upper limits of the atmosphere in September, with sales dropping by 3 percent compared to the same month a year ago.

Maybe the Jeep brand isn’t bigger than Jesus. With the new vehicle market cooling off and two of its oldest — but still strong-selling — models being pared down to one, Jeep needs to branch out to keep the momentum going.

It has products up its sleeve — a Wrangler pickup and $140,000 luxo-ute to name a couple — and has factories planned for developing nations everywhere, but Jeep could reap a sales reward if it stopped screwing up in one obvious but overlooked market.

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Did a Detroit Scrapyard Just Sell Someone a 2018 Jeep Wrangler Hood?

The Jeep Wrangler rumor mill has run with a wide-open throttle ever since Fiat Chrysler Automobiles’ sweater-clad chairman started work on the next-generation model.

Details are still scarce, but we know that the 2018 Wrangler sports plenty of aluminum parts and an oh-so-careful redesign. However, one Minnesota Jeep enthusiast believes he got his hands on a piece of the real thing, and from an unlikely source.

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Jeep Renegade May Possess Flamboyant Braking Issue

Jeep may have an issue with the Renegade and is either unaware of it or in denial.

A video shot by Spanish reviewer Pablo González shows a Renegade’s rear end catching serious air during a routine braking test. The video, posted on 77km.com and first noticed by Jalopnik, is alarming — the test vehicle’s front end nosedives, while the rear wheels leave the pavement entirely.

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Piston Slap: Best Reason to Buy a Chrysler 200?

Ronald writes:

I have an hour-plus commute with light to moderate traffic that fluctuates between 50 to 70 miles per hour. Adaptive cruse control would be great, but how cheap of a used car can I find with the technology?

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  • Rochester "better than Vinfast" is a pretty low bar.
  • TheMrFreeze That new Ferrari looks nice but other than that, nothing.And VW having to put an air-cooled Beetle in its display to try and make the ID.Buzz look cool makes this classic VW owner sad 😢
  • Wolfwagen Is it me or have auto shows just turned to meh? To me, there isn't much excitement anymore. it's like we have hit a second malaise era. Every new vehicle is some cookie-cutter CUV. No cutting-edge designs. No talk of any great powertrains, or technological achievements. It's sort of expected with the push to EVs but there is no news on that front either. No new battery tech, no new charging tech. Nothing.
  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.