Jeep Wrangler long-term test: 16,000 miles in a hardcore off-roader

Then there’s the fact that this unique shape and style means the doors and sections of the roof can be removed. The windscreen folds flat, too. I relish the idea of driving around like that for a bit in the summer, catching insects in my teeth.

We’re going to do it, too, and it all feeds off the straight edges and exposed hinges of the Wrangler’s styling. Even the rear compartment usefully contains a big, fat rollover bar that I’d rather have than the ritziest parcel shelf going.

The ride may be rough but it’s also tough: you can feel the strength with every jolt. It rides flatly and never pitches. And sure, the steering is nothing special at 70mph, but the gearing and effort (plus wheel diameter and rim cross-section) are perfect for 15-25mph manoeuvring, which is what you do a helluva lot of both on road and off.

The little bit of green-laning I’ve so far done near home shows that even a non-Rubicon Wrangler is perfect for the job. A real surprise is how well the Wrangler does in town. Potholes are nothing to it. The elevated driving position and straight sides work in your favour. It doesn’t even feel particularly wide, but that grille and the red paint helpfully encourage people to stay out of your way.

And then there’s the engine. Having come from an ancient era when Jeeps had V8s and even before that a crude six, I didn’t have high hopes for the 272bhp 2.0-litre turbo four, even when mated to a creamy seven-speed auto ’box.

I imagined I would be talking lag and uneven torque delivery. Not a bit of it: this engine pulls strongly from nothing, cruises smoothly, can handle a tall gearing and can punt this two-tonne machine from 0-60mph in a mere 7.6sec. I can pass people easily on the open road using kickdown.

Its fuel consumption is a bugbear, but I had expected that. The usual is 24-26mpg in any use, and if you ever see 28mpg, you get the flags out. Even so, you can expect a touring range close to 500 miles, because the fuel tank is vast, at 99.5 litres.

So far, my mode of use has been town running and motorways; not much off-roading. Despite that, this is proving to be a handy car: easy to use and immensely tough. Better still, it’s enjoyable. I love knowing it can’t be hurt by kerbs or potholes; I revel in the engine performance.

The straight-backed driving position suits me too. The ultra-compact dashboard layout has switches. And the whole thing has that air of simple optimism that can still be found in American machinery, even if nothing much these days comes from one country.

Other Wrangler drivers wave at you (although the whole Wrangler community ignores lesser Jeep models). Defender owners seem not to think much of Wranglers – and they do, it must be admitted, drive a better vehicle.

But in your Wrangler you’re weirdly content, laughing, as I said earlier, at sober perfectionism. I’ve got months of this ahead – bring it on.

Update 2

The Wrangler has been here for only a few weeks and I’ve already done 4500 miles. One reason is that we’ve been busy, but it’s mostly because, for all its beguiling crudity, the Jeep turns out to be (as I knew it would) one of those happy cars you use for everything.

When the task is to drive from our village to an area of restricted parking in the nearby market town, I’d usually take a smaller car from our fleet – the Dacia Duster or the Mini – but I find myself thinking ‘what the hell’ and taking the Jeep anyway. With its elevated driving position, straight sides, excellent mirrors and good defences against other parkers, it’s an easy choice.

One phenomenon that’s at odds with other cars is my pleasure at the accumulating mileage (apart from the cost of 25.6mpg fuel consumption). I’ve always worried about a tumbling odometer, but not this time. The baked-in American toughness is one reason – I’ll bet at 150,000 miles this Jeep won’t feel much different – but the other is its aura of timelessness, like an old Land Rover Defender. The usual consciousness of age just isn’t there. 

I’ve had numerous conversations recently with people in petrol stations who remark that driving a new Wrangler is the closest you can get to enjoying the simple, old-time advantages of a pre-2016 Landie, but with niceties such as decent ventilation, heated seats, active cruise control and Apple CarPlay. That’s so true.

When you drive a Wrangler you think about the ride quality a lot, at least at the start of a journey. By any conventional judgement, it’s rough. But two things happen when you’ve been going a few minutes: first, you’re reassured by the Jeep’s sheer win-the-war structural strength, advertised by its scorn for the worst of bumps; second, soon it doesn’t seem to matter any more.

Against expectation I’m especially grateful for the Wrangler Sahara’s massive Bridgestone Dueler H/T mud and snow tyres, whose thigh-high 255/70 R18 proportions ensure they’re kerb-proof and tolerably quiet (unlike the pure off-road hoops of the Wrangler Rubicon) yet well up to all but the toughest off-road challenges.

They’re like the rest of this Wrangler I’m increasingly coming to admire: never sophisticated but always up to the job.

Update 3

When I talk about this Jeep being a great car in the suburbs, people tend to laugh. They’re thinking about its height, size and weight rather than other things that matter every bit as much, perhaps more.

But, believe it or not, you’ve got practically everything going for you. You sit high in a vehicle visible to oncomers from all angles. Its body has straight sides and isn’t as wide as people think. Including mirrors, it measures just 1.87m, which is usefully less than the Land Rover Defender (2.1m).

For passengers, the firm and upright seats, set high, make for a much more sociable travelling experience. And kids can see stuff they’re denied in today’s high-waisted SUVs – and seeing stuff, as any parent knows, is the key to a dramatic reduction in the number of ‘are we there yet?’ requests.

But the handiest thing of all is the wheel and tyre package. This Sahara model wears tall and fat-walled (70-series) all-season Bridgestones on good-looking 18in alloys. They come as close to being kerb-proof as any combination I’ve tried, yet they don’t have the aggressive and noisy off-road pattern that comes standard with the more off-road-focused Rubicon model, so they’re reasonably quiet at 70mph on the motorway.

When you’re faced with one of those impossible situations with oncoming traffic in town or on narrow country lanes when one or other of you has to drive up a kerb or stick a wheel onto a rough verge, the someone can always be you. The Wrangler is made for the job.

Other town advantages? There’s the smooth and flexible 2.0-litre engine that pulls from nothing. There’s the super-smooth automatic transmission with a first gear that’s low enough to let you amble along at ultra-low speeds – perhaps behind the bicycles that are so prevalent at this time of the year.

Even the ride quality, hard by most standards, is stiff and tough enough to allow you to forge unconcernedly through pothole combinations that have other irate drivers phoning the local council.

To summarise, it’s the Wrangler’s simple, willing ability to cope with whatever it meets that makes it so appealing – and this quality is as useful in city centres as on country roads. It’s fashionable to harp on about modern life’s depressingly complex problems, but in the midst of all that, the Wrangler always seems to have a simple, happy solution.

Update 4

When people talk about elephants in rooms, they are usually referring to some looming threat or fault. However, in the very special case of our Jeep Wrangler Sahara, the elephant refers to a glorious positive.

Not only that, it’s also an asset that no other Jeep family member can boast, let alone any of the Wrangler’s more conventional rivals. The entire roof can be lifted off. All four doors can be removed, too, and the windscreen will fold forwards onto the bonnet, safari-hunter style.

This, along with the robust ride and the general Tonka toughness of every aspect of the Wrangler, is why people so often reckon it’s quite similar to a traditional Land Rover Defender but with modern facilities (central touchscreen, adaptive cruise control, ventilation that works), and they’re right to do so.

I made that elephant reference because, despite racking up a prodigious mileage during my short ownership, I never quite got around to removing the lid until the last few weeks, partly out of caution (who wants to get halfway through such an operation and find they can’t complete it?) and partly because it was pretty obvious that we would need several sets of hands to handle the bulk and weight.

In the end, having heard from Jeep UK PR manager Manesh Taank (one of those blokes who work for car companies who can handle any task) that removal was easy, we persuaded him to come around to the Autocar office and manage the whole operation. Naturally, on the day we chose it was bucketing…

Still, Manesh turned out to be quite right about the ease of removal and refitting: it is easy. The lid lifts out in three pieces. There are two smaller composite panels over the driver and front passenger that can be removed on their own and are then stored in a bag you then carry with your luggage.

The third is a much larger single piece covering the whole car from B-pillar to rear and including the windows down to waist height. That takes at least two people to lift, and three is better because although it’s not heavy, it is quite high off the floor.

Without those panels, the Wrangler becomes a different car, although for this exercise we left the doors in place (the car isn’t legal on UK roads without them). We did fold the windscreen down briefly, discovering once again that only those who have never driven a car with no windscreen think it’s a viable way to travel.

Then, with no roof overhead and all the side windows lowered, I made several forays into the back streets of Twickenham with the rain streaming, Morgan-style, down the inside of the flat windscreen just as much as the outside. It was strictly short-term fun and very damp, but the boom of the engine was more evident and very pleasant, and my promise to try the Wrangler roofless was kept.

The drenching of the interior furnishings had no lasting effect on the Wrangler at all. For one thing, the fascia is partly protected by the windscreen frame above and is nearly vertical, so rain goes straight past and hits seats or carpet.

For another, the robust trim materials on the doors, floors and dashboard are obviously specifically chosen to withstand drenching. We cursorily wiped the seats and dials dry, and within an hour the cabin looked just like normal.

I have absolutely no doubt that, were this my own car, it would spend quite a few days of the summer with parts of the roof missing, especially since you can buy soft canopies for these for use when the weather is uncertain. Just that ability, even when not utilised, makes you feel superior to the rest of the serious 4x4 brigade.

Indeed, it’s capabilities like this that make the Wrangler feel unique and timeless – a copy of nothing, as another manufacturer might put it. Any owner, even if they have one just for a while, will themselves be hoping the Wrangler will live forever.

Update 5 

I’ve been behind the wheel of our resident 4x4 for a while now. Whenever I see the Jeep, there’s just one thing I think of and that’s the classic children’s character Clifford the Big Red Dog.

There is an incredibly obvious parallel, both being not only red, but also massive. When I clambered up into the cabin for the first time (something not made any easier by the strangely high-up side steps), I felt like I was sat in a tower crane. The driving position seems somehow even higher than the similarly monstrous Ineos Grenadier, despite being a slightly shorter car overall.

And that’s before you get to the length and width. At 1894mm wide and 4882mm long including the spare wheel, it’s slightly longer than a standard UK parking space – and it feels it. I could’ve written a short novel in the time I’ve spent wheeling around car parks looking for slightly out-of-the-way spaces where I can leave the Jeep poking out of a bay it’s a little too long for without anyone taking the front off.

But once you get out of the Great British multi-storey car park – being mindful not to smack the huge underbite on a concrete post as you leave – it feels strangely at home. I maintain that large mirrors are among the best ways to help make a car easier to place on the road, and this is proof of that.

It’s helped further by the fact that they hardly extrude any further out than the front wheel arches, so you’re totally sure of how much space you have to play with.

Not unexpectedly, it feels most at home out in the sticks, with a single-lane road barely wide enough to squeeze down seeming to be its natural habitat. When you first get behind the wheel, you get a nagging feeling that you’ve accidentally dropped into a chopped-roof hot rod, the windscreen all but a letterbox slit.

You get used to it quickly, though, and on narrow lanes it comes into its own – the width and short height are a similar ratio to a cinema screen, which helps every drive feel like a film.

Anyway, let’s get back to more sensible things such as comparing a car to Clifford the Big Red Dog. If you’ve ever taken a dog for a walk and it’s been sufficiently pleased with the experience, you’ll no doubt have noticed that when they wag their tail they’re actually shaking their whole rear end.

Thanks to a classic combination of body-on-frame construction and a front beam axle, that’s exactly what the Wrangler feels like it’s doing when you pick up any form of speed on any sort of road, even a snooker-table smooth one. It really does behave like a big old labrador taking a curious sniff of what’s around in hedges at the side of the path, requiring a steady tug of the lead – or in this case a gentle waggle of the wheel – to keep on track.

It can be irritating on a long drive, but still, the Jeep puts a smile on your face. Its talkative steering – but not in a language anyone can understand – somehow just adds to the character. Maybe instead of shouting, it’s barking?

Jack Harrison

Final report

The Jeep Wrangler has left us. Our long-term 2.0-litre Sahara departed the Autocar fold recently with 25,500 miles on the clock (around 16,000 of them amassed in our hands). Its new mission is to find another owner, and our world is definitely not a better place as a result.

This was far from being the best car or even the best 4x4 we’ve driven, but it was probably the most lovable. As the impressive mileage we racked up suggests, the Firecracker Red five-door proved to be one of the more popular cars on our fleet during its time with us.

Quite a lot of us added to its miles, and we used it for a variety of purposes: plodding across muddy fields, tugging motorbike trailers, tow-starting neighbours’ cars, cruising through cities, carrying stuff home from Ikea and, of course, plying the nation’s motorways in pursuit of stories and pictures.

The point of ‘goodbye’ stories like this, I always think, is to list the most memorable facets of a car – the stuff you won’t forget. Three things about the Wrangler stood out: its Americanness (with the simplicity and optimism that this always seems to bring), the brilliance of its ultra-chunky styling, whose basics have been refined in Wranglers for aeons, and the feeling of timelessness.

We’ve got used to cars ageing quickly, but I have a strong feeling that this Jeep will look just as good and relevant in five to 10 years as it does today. This is one characteristic that it shares with the traditional Land Rover Defender, which departed new-car showrooms for the last time in 2016: well-preserved 2000 versions still look like peas from the same pod.

The Jeep feeling I’ve always had is that driving one feels like a sanitised version of that traditional Landie – not a modern replacement like the Defender that JLR sells now but a machine with the classic edition’s character yet incorporating proper ventilation, a decent infotainment system, more effective defence against car criminals, heated seats that work and even active cruise control. It’s not modern, the Wrangler, but magnificently timeless.

Which is not to suggest that this Wrangler doesn’t properly fit the modern motoring scene. True, you have to compromise on stuff like cabin access (climbing into the cockpit requires contortions hatchback owners will never know), but the reward is comfortable upright seating that gives every occupant a superb view of the world rolling by.

For your first day or two, the powertrain is a major surprise. A Stellantis-sourced 2.0-litre four-pot turbo petrol engine punching out 272bhp hardly sounds like an ideal choice for an old-school 4x4 with a flat screen and a frontal area the size of a locomotive. Sounds puny, you might think, or peaky. Yet it works brilliantly.

When driving, you never wish for an alternative. The ubiquitous ZF eight-speed automatic gearbox makes the best of the engine’s healthy torque and power; this machine can both creep and cruise with the best.

It’s also fun to work the four-wheel drive system yourself, even if that sounds old-school. The Sahara lacks quite the same hardcore suspension and transmission gadgetry of the Rubicon models, but it’s still very, very capable in tough going. On our own off-road exploits, it was hard even to spin a wheel.

One major surprise is the acceleration. This thing weighs 2300kg (the three-door Wrangler, no longer offered in the UK, saves 500kg), yet it will do 0-62mph in around 7.9sec, which makes it feel brisk when you go for the power.

The cost of that comes in fuel: Jeep advertises 25mpg combined. However, if you refrain from caning the car and utilise its lower-speed torque, you will probably exceed this most of the time. Cruising with the motorway traffic is easy enough, and the Wrangler surprises by not generating much wind noise, despite its house-brick outline. 

Even road roar is tolerable – more than you could say for a Rubicon on its butch-looking lug tyres. The Wrangler’s steering and ride aren’t its strongest suits, but you eventually reach an accommodation with both. The ride isn’t remotely supple, but it advertises the whole machine’s toughness.

And when you chuck the big beast at a complex and alarming system of ruts, the capable damping comes into its own, admirably maintaining stability and coping easily with road shocks that would probably do actual harm to ordinary cars. The easy, fairly high-geared steering works best at lower speeds.