Wrangler – The ExhaustNotes Blog

You know you’re scraping the bottom of the content barrel when you start reviewing the reviews on your own website. It’s lame, I know, but Berk’s recent Jeep review, while mostly positive, lacked the context that a long time Jeep owner can bring to the table. In short, Berk felt the Jeep was fun but several flaws kept it from being a car he would actually buy. I use the word car on purpose because if you compare the Jeep Wrangler to a car it will lose every time.

One of Berk’s observations was that the two-door Wrangler lacked interior space for normal day-to-day operations. Specifically, that the Jeep didn’t have enough room to carry his gear to the shooting range. It’s a valid complaint but that didn’t stop those guys on TV’s Rat Patrol show from harassing Rommel’s Africa Corps. There is a 4-door Wrangler version that provides a bit more room for gear but for this review-review we will stick to the 2-door.

Berk mentioned the ride quality of the Wrangler as being less than ideal. The Jeep Wrangler, like Harley Davidson, is trapped by its own success. Jeep customers want a Wrangler to be a Wrangler regardless of modern advancements. Wrangler 4×4 protocol requires straight axles front and rear and body-on-frame construction. These rules are inviolate and will remain as long as there is a Jeep Wrangler. If Jeep came out with a unibody, independently sprung Wrangler the true believers would be jumping out of 5th story windows. Continuity is more important than comfort.

Add up the short wheelbase, heavy unsprung axle weight, relatively light sprung weight and you get a choppy, rough ride. Jeep has steadily improved the ride of the Wrangler through the years. The difference between my 1992 Wrangler and a new Wrangler is shocking. The difference between a new Wrangler and any other new car is just as shocking. My 1992 can be painful on rough roads. Sometimes you have to stop and walk.

Berk mentioned that the Wrangler felt a bit loose at speed. He was running 80 miles per hour! That kind of speed is unbelievable to me. The brick-shape of a Wrangler is the worse aerodynamic shape you could devise. The Wrangler would be more aerodynamic if you flipped it around and made the back the front. This horrible shape causes massive separations in the laminar flow around the Jeep body. Huge sections of air break away from the body buffeting the Jeep to and fro. If you managed to get a Wrangler going fast enough its paint would peel off from cavitation. All this turbulence causes noise and vibration; the Jeep is actually much quieter when driven in a perfect vacuum.

Berk noted the poor fit and finish of his rental car. The gas cap bezel was really ill-fitting which shouldn’t happen on a car with such a long production run. I’ll give him this one. Jeeps are put together sort of sloppily but you have to realize the abuse they will be put to. Once your Jeep has been rolled over on its side you will appreciate the fact that it looks no worse than before. Underneath the Jeep, where it matters, you’ll find tough running gear that can take a fair bit of abuse. Jeep owners regularly screw up their Wranglers with huge tires and massive suspension alterations then they try to break them over rocks. The Jeep running gear stoically put up with the stupidity. You can’t do this kind of stuff with a real car.

Berk felt that 16 miles to a gallon for a 4-cylinder Jeep was not great fuel economy. Remember, he was cruising 80 miles per hour. My 4-cylinder Wrangler gets around 15 miles to a gallon at 60 miles per hour. It doesn’t take a math teacher to figure out the fuel economy on the Wrangler has been greatly improved through the years. Unfortunately I can’t give you the gas mileage for my Jeep at 80 miles per hour because my 1992 won’t do 80 miles per hour.

Like a Harley owner, a Jeep owner becomes adept at making excuses for their Jeep. Also like a Harley you don’t get a normal consumer experience in a Jeep Wrangler. The car is a throwback; a living dinosaur that you can use to ply the dirt trails of America. The Wrangler is constructed like cars were in the 1940s with only the electronics modernized.

Buying a Wrangler for commuting is silly for all the reasons Berk mentioned in his review. However, if you live on a steep dirt road that gets snow in the winter a Wrangler makes sense. In 4-wheel low you’ll be amazed at the hills you can climb and the places you can get stuck. I think Berk summed it up nicely when he said the Wrangler is a fun car to drive but he wouldn’t want to own one. I agree with that sentiment, except I own one.

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On a recent secret mission to southeastern Colorado, the rental car agency at Denver International Airport was down to Nissans. I hate Nissans, and I asked the rental car dude if anything else was available. “Just a couple of Jeep Wranglers,” said dude responded. Hmmm. I always thought it might be cool to have a Jeep. I could pretend I was Joe Gresh.

Yours truly, looking like Rambo (or maybe Joe Gresh) in the Denver International Airport rental car plaza.

“I’m in,” I said, and I was in in my very own Jeep Wrangler of the two-door turbocharged four persuasion. Short. Choppy. Uncomfortable. Gas guzzling. But a lot of fun. Gresh, I get it. I want one. Not enough to buy one, but enough to rent one again.

There’s a turbocharged 4-banger somewhere in there.

You can buy a Jeep with four engines this year:

- - The standard V-6 3.6 liter
  - The same V-6 with an electronic motor hybrid deal (it sounds on the Jeep site like it’s not an Al Gore eco thing, but more of an assist for rock crawling).
  - A turbocharged smaller four-banger (a price delete option, which is a nice way of saying it’s an option that lowers the price of the new Jeep).
  - A 392-cubic-inch hemi. Just for grins I looked for a dealer online that had one of these $80K hemi Jeeps in stock, and I found one. It’s an $88K Jeep that gets 17 mpg on the highway and 13 in the city. Here in the People’s Republik, gas is well over $6.00 per gallon. Filling up my Subaru cost $95.12 yesterday.

My rental car had the turbo four banger and it still sucked fuel like a politician seeking campaign donations. At first I thought it was not going to be so bad because the instrument info center said I was averaging over 20 miles per gallon, but when I got out on the freeway at 77 mph it said my instant fuel economy was in the “you’ve got to be kidding me” category. That little 4-banger was actually doing worse than what Jeep claimed the 392 Hemi would get.

My istantaneous fuel economy at the time I took this photo was 16 mpg. That was on cruise control at 77 mph. I never could get back to this screen.

I suppose I might as well get the negative stuff out of the way first. For starters, fuel economy was atrocious. But then, folks don’t buy Wranglers for their fuel economy. And on that subject, I found that switching between screens to get the fuel economy info was tricky…tricky enough that I couldn’t find my way back to the instant fuel economy screen. Maybe the Jeep genies thought I didn’t need to know. Some things are better left unsaid, I suppose.

Another negative, which is maybe a positive, is that my Jeep felt gangly to me. Not as in tattoos and gats, but as in unsteady on its feet and ready to tip over (think of me putting my pants on in the morning and you’ll get the picture). Part of that was due to the Jeep’s height and its extremely tight turning radius (small steering wheel inputs made for huge course corrections, and on the freeway steering that barn door at nearly 80 mph it was all a bit unsettling). On a dirt road, though, K turns become a thing of the past. This thing can turn on a dime and give you nine cents change. It can make a U-turn on a two lane road.

Monster fobs. Hard to lose. Easy to inadvertently activate.

The key fobs were huge, and I guess that’s okay, but I found I was unlocking the Wrangler or setting off the panic alarm damn near every time I put the key fobs in my pocket, or if I stuck my hand in my pocket to get my chapstick or anything else.

Cargo space? As the Sopranos might say, fuhgeddaboutit. The rental car dude folded the rear bench seat up, but it wouldn’t stay up, and even when it did, there really wasn’t any room for my gear. You’re not going to be taking a lot of stuff with you in a two-door Wrangler. That pretty much killed it for me as a rifle range car. I wouldn’t be able to get all my shooting gear in there.

Wind noise is another issue. Oddly, it didn’t bother me when I was driving, even at freeway speeds. But no one could hear or understand me on a Bluetooth telephone conversation. Two folks gave up altogether and just hung up. Maybe that’s a good thing.

Seriously? This is the kind of fit and finish we get on an American legend, a descendent of the vehicle that helped us win World War II?

One last point…although the overall build quality seemed to be pretty good, Jeep lost me from a quality perspective with the fuel filler cap fit. It looks like the production tolerances were either not met or they were assigned by an AutoCad jockey who went to the Doris Day school of mechanical design.

The good news? Well, the good news is that there’s lots of good news. I fell in love with my Jeep. It was cool and I felt cool driving it. And even though it was tall enough to make getting in and out difficult, I knew almost immediately I’d be renting one on my next secret mission. I don’t need the Aston Martin and its machine guns, smoke dispensers, and ejection seat. For my secret missions, I want a Jeep.

Man, that Jeep was fun. Once I got over the difference in feel between it and a regular car, I felt invincible. Seriously. I mean, I’m a 71-year-old Jewish kid from New Jersey with a different doctor for damn near every organ in my body, but I still felt invincible in my Wrangler. I was driving directly into a Colorado hailstorm east of the Rocky Mountains at close to 80 mph, but I was in a Jeep. Gresh, I get it. It’s a power thing.

After the hail passed and I was back on the road, I found another plus: The headlights actually lit up the road, even on low beam, and that’s something I had not experienced in any rental car in a while.

Imagine that: Headlights that actuallly work!

So I was out there in cow country and the center of an ag world, doing my secret mission thing and having fun like I always do. Way off in the distance from the secret mission du jour there’s a couple of hills called Two Buttes (it’s actually one hill with two peaks). I had always wanted to ride out to Two Buttes and see what it was all about. I knew a Jeep wasn’t really essential, but the combination of longer days (more sunlight), the draw of a place unexplored, the dirt roads to get there, and my Jeep worked its magic.

Headed into the Two Buttes State Wildlife Area.

From the main road, Two Buttes looks like it would be easy to find and easy to find my way around. Like elections, though, what you think you’re going to get and what you actually get aren’t often the same. When I got closer to the Two Beauts, I found the area was a maze of dirt roads laid out in no particular order. The guys I was working with on my secret mission told me about a hidden lake, and my objective was to find it and grab a few photos. Waze was sketchy as hell out there in farmroadland, but I didn’t care. I was in a Jeep.

Ah, success. The lake and the Jeep, as seen through my iPhone’s wide angle lens.

Another photo of the lake, or pond, or whatever it actually is called.

I explored, I shot a bunch of iPhone photos, and I had a good time. I want a Jeep. I’m not going to get one. But I want one.

My last photo of the day, leaving the Two Buttes State Wildlife Area.

Maybe it would be even more fun with the 392 Hemi. I did a bit more research, and I learned that Jeep only introduced the 392 Hemi this year, in 2022. It seems that the new Ford Bronco (you can read our mini-review of it here) will be offered with a V8 in their Bronco Raptor package and Chrysler felt compelled to counter. Hey, whatever floats your boat. I found this 392 Hemi Jeep review and I thought you might find it interesting.