Jeep Grand Cherokee (2011)
by Mike Grundon (27 June 2011)
Would you or wouldn't you? If you'd just spent 44k on a car and you were nosing it up to a 45-degree bank of wet, red clay, would you just keep going or would you stop? If that car was a new Jeep Grand Cherokee, the choice would be yours. Whether or not you would, the truth is you could and probably should, just to see what all your money has been spent on.
I did.
I put it into low-range, dialled mud and snow into the Selec-Trac four-wheel-drive system and just let the car do the thinking for me. Slowly and steadily the nose of the 2.3-tonne truck rose up the wall of mud in front of me and the back wheels followed suit. I swear you couldn't have walked up that bank in hiking boots it was so slippery. No problem for the car though. It just pushed the torque to the wheels with the most grip and kept climbing until it crested the hill and calmly pitched over the top and slowly slithered down into the muddy pit beyond.
This was just a small section of an off-road course set up for the launch of this, the 2011 version of Jeep's flagship car. It went on to include deep, slippery tramlines through the woods, a short section of concrete steps and a number of cross-axle twists, steep climbs, sharp break-overs and plummeting drops. The Jeep performed miraculously, despite being shod with standard Continental road tyres, not the great knobbly affairs normally associated with the brown and stickies.
In these strange times of crossover vehicles and faux quatre roués motrices, styled to look like SUVs but with limited ground clearance and sometimes (horrors) with only two-wheel drive, it's comforting to look at the list of genuinely useful pieces of off-road kit on the Grand Cherokee. Particularly if, like me, last winter brought you weeks of iced roads, as slippery as a bottle, and deep snowdrifts, sifted and sculpted by Force 10 northeasterlies.
Wheels pushed out to each corner mean the approach, breakover and departure angles (25, 18 and 23 degrees) are steep enough to keep its chin, belly and tail off the ground in all but the most ferocious ridges. Underneath, everything is tucked up out of the way of snags and boulders.
The Quadra-Trac II system is what puts drive to the wheels with most grip. It uses an electronically controlled clutch to distribute torque around the wheels and it steps in to smooth out your lumpy control of the throttle to prevent wheelspin. There's also a hill descent control system to stop you running away on the downhills without you having to dab the brakes, and hill assist that stops you rolling backwards when you've stopped partway up a gradient.
The Selec-Trac system allows the driver to select the most appropriate engine, braking, suspension and drive characteristics by simply turning a knob to the type of terrain being encountered like rock, sand, mud or snow. You can manually pick and lock-in your preferred gear through the sequential gearshift option in the five-speed automatic box, and there's a low-range transfer box that gives you crawler gears at the touch of a button.
And if you get the top-spec vehicle you have adjustable air suspension known as Quadra-Lift with a range of four inches that can either low the car for easy loading and better performance on the road, or pump it up to give almost 11 inches of ground clearance in the rough. On tiptoe it can safely wade through almost two feet of water.
Of course most of the time the Grand Cherokee will be on the road, rather than off it, and settings in the Selec-Trac reflect that. You can leave it in Automatic mode so it'll only kick you back from rear-wheel into four-wheel-drive when you start slipping. Or you can put it into Sport mode which firms up the air suspension if it's fitted to your version, and remaps the engine characteristics to put performance over economy.
I say performance, but when you stomp on the accelerator the big car feels like it's surging out along the road with tremendous gravity, rather than leaping out with enthusiasm. The standard suspension allows a restricted level of roll through the corners, but the air suspension in Sport mode pretty well levels it out.
The Italian three-litre V6 CRD engine is built by VM Motori and was developed alongside Fiat Powertrain Technologies. It's new, it's the only one available in the car, it's powerful and, in comparison to past models, it's relatively economical and clean.
It cranks out up to 237bhp, which is enough to haul this heavy car up to 62mph in just 8.2 seconds. It's also enough to keep it going when it's carrying over 0.6 tonnes in payload and towing 3.5 tonnes in a braked trailer. One imagines if you did all that you'd be able to physically hear it gulping down the diesel as it goes. Officially the engine has a combined fuel consumption of 34mpg when it isn't thus encumbered – a 19% improvement on the outgoing model and a figure that looks pretty impressive when compared with similar sized vehicles from Land Rover, Toyota and Mercedes-Benz. However, it's probably wildly optimistic for most of us leaden-footed mortals.
The vehicle platform was developed alongside Mercedes-Benz and is said to be considerably stiffer than that on the last model Grand Cherokee. It'll be seen again soon on the next generation of M-B cars.
Needless to say, the accommodation is commodious. Climb into the heated and cooled leather seats of the top-spec Overland version and close the big door behind you and you can listen to the echoes die away into the middle distance of the interior.
Your chums can settle comfortably into any of the four remaining seats – all of them heated and with air-blower of their own – all of them, front and back, with plenty of knee- and head-room. The boot is almost large enough to have its own weather system. The rear hatch is opened and closed by a motor and the cargo hold is flat-ottomed with no lip, which is good for moving luggage in and out.
The downside is that the full-sized spare tyre is under the floor so if you get a flat on the way home in the rain from the week's big shop at Asda or while on holiday with a boot full of camping gear, you'll have to dig it out and lift it out. I hope you're feeling fit.
As for extra kit, you've got keyless entry, so just step on the brake, make sure it's in Park and stab the start button to go. Lights, dials and displays glitter and sparkle around you to tell you what the car's doing. There's satellite navigation, a reversing camera, an Alpine multifunction sound system and a great rake of toys and safety equipment that's longer than I care to go into.
In general it all feels pretty solid in and around the driving seat – which is nice for Jeep – but if you lift the lid on the twin-level cubby box under your elbow you’ll see thin, brittle-feeling plastic that harks back to the old days when Jeep skimped a bit more on internal fittings than was strictly necessary.
There are two models available just now – the Limited with a price tag of £36,795, and the Overland (named in tribute to Willys-Overland, the company that started it all back in '41) at £43,995. They are expensive, but Jeep says when you tally up all the extra equipment you get as part of the standard packages, they're pretty strong when measured against their main competitors.
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