Price as tested: €54,995
+ Handsome looks, comfy, decent chassis, good quality, excellent engine
– Some cheap trim, body rolls a lot
= One of the most pleasant surprises of the year
Managing a brand is tricky. Every new product has to be good, slightly better than its predecessors, yet not so much that owners of the old one feel gypped. Innovation is everything yet you can’t get too avant-garde, or your risk alienating the technophobes.
And even the best get it wrong. Coca-Cola royally stuffed it up in the early eighties with New Coke. Most of you probably don’t remember it and that’s a good thing. It was terrible, and it nearly killed the company. Likewise, Apple, the most valuable company in the world right now, once (or twice) got it spectacularly wrong. Neither the Newton Message Pad nor the Pippin games console set the world alight. How did these companies recover from such failures? By getting back to what they’re best at and digging deep to create some truly great products.
Which brings us nicely to the Jeep Grand Cherokee. When Jeep first began its trans-Atlantic foray in the early nineties (well, the first since 1945 at any rate), the Grand Cherokee was the star of the show. Big, bluffly handsome and very American in its value for money, it nevertheless had a very real tilt at the vaunted Range Rover’s luxury SUV crown. All that let it down was the lack of a decent diesel engine.
Come the 2005 model and all the omens looked great. A new body and chassis, and a new diesel engine from then owners of Chrysler, Mercedes-Benz. It should have been brilliant. It was actually awful. The engine was fine but the gimpy styling wasn’t, nor was the crummy, cramped cabin and the ride and handling, with those big, hefty live axles, was utterly dreadful. Never mind the Range Rover, launched a year after the Land Rover Discovery III, the Grand Cherokee should have been a convincing rival to the Disco but instead struggled to even be an also-ran.
Combine that with a pretty poor Cherokee and an utterly dreadful double-whammy of 1st-gen Compass and Patriot and you have a brand rattling and creaking under the strain of some pretty serious duds.
But thankfully, the Jeep brand is a strong one and like Coke and Apple, it regrouped, delved deep and started to do things better. Should we expect any less from the only car brand ever to be name checked as a war-winner by none other than Brig. General Dwight D. Eisenhower? Resilience is in the blood.
As with the 2002 Range Rover, the new Jeep Grand Cherokee has been developed under the auspices of one car company and launched under another. In the Rangie’s case, it was developed and prototyped by BMW but Ford swept in the year before its launch to buy out Land Rover and so got the kudos for one of the most iconic SUVs of all time.
For the Grand Cherokee, work began while Jeep, owned by Chrysler, was indepedent, hived off from former owners Daimler-Benz and then under the control of investment fund Cerberus. So, there’s rather a lot of Mercedes DNA deep within the structure of the Grand Cherokee. In fact, beneath its all-American skin, it’s very much a Mercedes ML. And the biggest benefit of that is that the GC now does away with the awful live axles of old and switches instead to a much more car-like construction, with proper, modern, independent suspension with air springs.
The 241bhp, 550Nm 3.0-litre V6 diesel is a Merc job too, and goes about its business with remarkable refinement. It can grumble and moo a bit under heavy throttle openings, but that you suspect is more down to the old-school five-speed automatic gearbox, which simply doesn’t have the spread of ratios that’s required these days. A fix is on the way in late 2012, when the ZF-supplied 8-speed box comes on stream, so you can expect to see improvements in the current fuel consumption and Co2 figures of 8.3-litres per 100km and 218g/km. Still those are good enough for a near-enough 1,000km touring range from the 80-litre fuel tank and at least it’s not in the top band for road tax, so you’ll pay €1,050 a year while Land Rover drivers must pay top whack.
That switch to car-like construction and suspension has brought one of two massive improvements the new GC displays over its predecessor. While before, you had to put up with a truly dreadful ride quality and ponderous handling, now there is serenity. The ride can still occasionally be upset by sudden, sharp shocks, but that’s pretty much endemic to all vehicles that have air springs and big, heavy wheels and tyres. For the most part, the Grand Cherokee displays impressive composure, riding comfortably and dealing with swiftly taken corners with only slightly too much body roll. You can sharpen things up by flicking the Selec-Terrain system into Sport (there are also Snow, Auto, Mud and Sand modes) but that disables the ESP, something we were loathe to do given the recent weather conditions.
Which is a shame, as when you hustle it, the GC responds well. The steering is a touch long-winded, and there’s about as little road feel as you’d expect, but give it a challenging, twisty road, and it responds with aplomb. In fact, it treads an almost perfectly judged line between the two Land Rover products that most closely rival it. It’s not as smooth and refined as a Discovery, but it’s more responsive and rolls less, and it’s not as sharp and tall-hot-hatch-y as a Range Rover Sport but is much comfier and rides more calmly. If that sounds like an uncomfortable middle ground, it’s not. More of a finely judged compromise.
The cabin is a slightly less well judged compromise, but only in parts. Mostly, it’s very good with palpable quality, lots of space and very comfy seats. The boot, at 782-litres, is equally massive, but it does suffer from intrusion into the shape from what looks like the fuel tank. As for the rest of the cabin, a few small details let it down, such as main instruments, some lower-level plastics and a few switches that have no place on a €50K car (mind you, that’s a criticism you could level at rivals from Land Rover and Toyota too) and little touches detract from the overall sense of quality, like a gear shifter that looks and feels cheap and clunky and touch-screen controls for the infotainment system that appear to have been lifted from a Sega NES.
But these are but small quibbles, the stuff of a critic’s nit-picking. The overall effect of the Grand Cherokee is... charm. That’s a dangerous quality, because while charm can cover up a multitude of problems, it can never erase the fundamental failings of a poor vehicle. The last Grand Cherokee had charm, but it was still crap.
This one isn’t. The charm is still very much there, and it’s a blue-collar American charm that means that the GC feels less ostentatious (even net of the big chrome grille and wheels) than a Range Rover Sport. But it has only the mildest shortcomings to cover up for. Honestly, the Grand Cherokee has turned out to be one of the surprises of the year. A thoroughly well-sorted, dynamically capable and above all characterful and interesting vehicle, that’s well-priced in its segment and never less than welcoming and engaging as soon as you sit into the high-set driver’s seat. We just wish every new car could be so charming.
Facts & Figures
Jeep Grand Cherokee 3.0 CRD Limited
Price as tested: €54,995
Range price: TBC
Capacity: 2,987cc
Power: 241bhp
Torque: 550Nm
Top speed: 202kmh
0-100kmh: 8.2sec
Economy: 8.3l-100km (34.0mpg)
CO2 emissions: 218g/km
VRT Band: F. €1,050 road tax
Euro NCAP rating: Not yet tested
