I wrote a thing

"and 100 more" (nth256) 04/15/2015 at 01:28 • Filed to: None

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A wall of text, to be precise. Have a TRUE Jeep to whet your appetite:

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I’ve drawn a comparison between the base-spec Patriot and the VW Beetle before as well; I think it’s an apt association. Glad I’m not the only one who sees that.

But here’s my question: What is it specifically that you rail against when you talk about the new Cherokee, or the Renegade? What is this vaunted “tradition” that gets tossed around here to often that people are clinging to?

The Jeep tradition starts with a barebones military runabout. It was designed to be an engine with 4 wheels and seats, and marginally better than walking. If that’s what you’re after - absolutely spartan, zero-frills, dead-simple, and marginally better than walking - then no vehicle produced since the inception of the Jeep will pass your muster, except perhaps a couple models of farm tractor.

Think about it this way: you want a vehicle that will tackle a powerline road, ford a modest-sized stream, get you down to the beachhead and back... and then able to turn around and take the kids from soccer practice to the grocery store, then home via the freeway with less drama than an episode of Blue’s Clues. This literally covers probably half the new car market, and 99% of Jeep’s current lineup, including the Cherokee and Renegade. Cars today are built much better and with much more capability than they were decades ago.

Are you railing against comfort? Because all said, from the driver’s perspective, that’s about the only major difference - the visceral experience of muscling an unassisted steering wheel and a three-lever gearbox while bouncing on leaf springs, or a point-and-shoot experience in something more akin to an office chair and a computer. I GET the appeal of the former, but I also get the appeal of the latter. The market of current Jeeps is very much like the market for modern cameras. Yes, there is definitely an appeal to an old Yashica with manual focus, but you can’t deny that digital cameras have their place too, and many many more people are finding digital cameras to be more appealing from a price-point perspective, as well as the perspective of not feeling too dumb to understand F-stops and aperture settings. The exact same can be said about an old Willys vs a brand new Renegade.

The fact is, Jeep is making money. At the end of the day, the goal of any business is to make money. Its as true now as it was back then. The old Jeep was a company trying to justify its own existence by selling a product that nobody else in the US had. That’s how they made their name iconic; THAT is their tradition. Now, there are so many basic, beige vehicles available that can do what only the old Jeeps could do before. Jeep has been required to innovate to a point, but they’ve hit a wall; their iconic name, their very popularity, has pulled them out of niche status. They CAN’T make niche vehicles anymore, because they are surfing on a wave of popularity, and that wave says “I really want a Jeep, and I have all this money (er, credit) to spend, but i kiiiiiinda want it to be more like this, and less like that.” They’ve opened up to market focus groups and government mandates and corporate bean counters. Jeep’s game now is not one of establishing credibility, nor one of maintaining it; their goal now is to further the brand.

I watched an in-car video of one of those Camp Jeep things, where they set up the various obstacles for the Jeep vehicles to drive across to highlight the new features and assess the capabilities of each platform. They had an in-car video of passengers inside a new Cherokee, following a new Wrangler, up a 35° incline and decline ramp. The Wrangler crawled right up with little hesitation. The Cherokee, also, crawled right up, with little hesitation, then descended the other side without the driver touching the gas or brake on the way down. Then the video smash-cuts to an in-car video of a Renegade, doing the same incline, admittedly with a bit more noise from the engine, but little hesitation, and descended in the same, controlled manner. Like it or not, the Cherokee and the Renegade are capable machines. I never once saw a Patriot or Compass, even a Trail-Rated version, doing those obstacles courses in all the years they’ve been on the market.

You can call ‘em both ugly, I won’t disagree there. I find the Renegade charming, at least. The Cherokee styling is, to me, more Subaru Tribeca than Jeep, but whatever.

I’m not trying to convince you to like either of the two newest models from Jeep. I likely won’t own either one in my lifetime, and I really think brand loyalty is a marketing CEO’s wet dream, which I choose not to be part of. By some unknowable set of circumstances, I have come to own a Jeep; Jeep doesn’t own me, nor do I choose to advertise/evangelize for them. It was simply my best option at the time. I get when brand loyalty is attached to a really good product; a product has earned that level of admiration. WhatI don’t get is sheeplike behavior revolving a nameplate. What I understand even less is backlash against said nameplate when they don’t make the same car they did 20 years ago. They pay lots and lots of money to people to tell them what an average of 1,000 Joe Schmoes want to buy. Not Joe himself, but the overall leaning of the group. Don’t be mad at Jeep, be mad at the soccer moms who show up at a dealership with a credit prequal from their credit union, and a vague memory from their late teens of an older boyfriend who used to drive a topless, lifted Wrangler, who made love to them on the beach one night... or the 59-year-old guy facing down his second Return of Saturn and his first mid-life crisis with a handful of hard-earned cash and a testosterone patch. They are watering down “your” Jeep experience. Who rides Harleys anymore? Doctors, lawyers, accountants, assistant deputies, college professors... How many “bikers” are still bikers? And how many of those bikers are really, really looking for a worked-over panhead from the ‘60s with some apehangers and a sissy bar? Not when that one there has the electric start, a four-speaker sound system, and traction control.

The Patriot/Compass was never meant to be as good as it was. And now its a dead end. They still sell so well because they’re cheap to make, and cheap to buy. What we are watching now is FCA banking on the fact that the Jeep name has built enough momentum to keep selling without relying on an inexpensive hold-over platform. Just like the original Beetle, the ideal of the People’s Car, and Volkswagen’s eventual move away from dirt-cheap-and-easy, this is the remnants of Chrysler saying, “Ok, let’s distance ourselves from that, and sell some better products.”

In THAT regard, I agree with you. Jeep is abandoning the lowest-common-denominator portion of the market by quitting the MK platform. But please understand, the Patriot, for all its utilitarian charm and charming utility, is a lowest-common-denominator vehicle. And Jeep doesn’t want to be associated with that image anymore.