Bruiser car. Everything about the new 2014 Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT, with its pugnacious nose, its monster 20-inch wheels with massive P295/45 tires, its snarling 470-horse V8 engine, shouts that here is a big, bad bully of a wagon. Lead, follow or get out of the way – it’s that kind of car. Which can be good or bad.
The 2014 version is an updated version of the most recent Grand Cherokee, and now incorporates a new eight-speed automatic transmission, with an electronic shifter knob that takes some getting used to. You can leave it in Drive all day or put it in Sport mode and shift, so to speak, to the paddle shifters behind the thick and muscular steering wheel. They keep coming up, these words like “muscular.” There’s a reason.
Nothing in this car is meant to be mild or docile. Yes, you can get a Jeep Grand Cherokee with more pedestrian drive trains (even a diesel, no less), but then you’d just have another middle-of-the-road SUV. This one, with the 6.4-liter V8 ripped from the dragstrip headlines, is meant to say something. It’s aggressive, it has that deep exhaust rumble; owning this car is like walking your pit bull into a genteel bar and asking for a Double Jack Neat, water back, (“and one for the dog, man, one for the dog”) while everyone around you is sipping a luminescent Sauvignon Blanc.
A cross between a hot rod and a wagon
Now that we’re over the impression of the car, the artistic delivery of the marketing and styling gurus has some interesting points. Somewhere in the marketing carrels of Chrysler (Jeep’s parent company), a subcommittee of sorts may well have pondered the idea of making a hot, hot wagon as a foil to all the bland, overstuffed SUVs and crossovers that comprise that lucrative market. What if we cross the Dodge Challenger SRT8 with the Grand Cherokee – we’ll stuff that great Challenger motor into the wagon, give the car some nasty black accents here and there and, voila!, we have a utilitarian hauler that will also, um, haul. And Haul. After a fashion, it works. Stomp on the gas pedal on a freeway on ramp (after the requisite check in the rear view mirror) and those 470 horses will emerge loudly from those exhaust tips and ramp you swiftly up the ramp – the car’s zero-to-60 times are regularly under five seconds and it’s said to have a 160 mph top end. Not that you’ll find many places to do that with impunity.
Out on the road, the car feels like it’s riding high – it’s already at nearly nine inches of ground clearance. You can easily play Boy Racer, by virtue of the paddle shifters, but beware of what you’re doing. The beast tends to get away from you, and I found that simply putting it in to Drive and just taking it easy for a while got me more used to how to gauge all that power. It also gave me a bit more time to glance around the dashboard and the center stack and the ergonomics as a whole. And it takes more than a glance.
The idea is that the cockpit – the driver’s side of the cockpit – should be designed with ease of utility in mind. How much time do we want to spend learning something new about how cars operate, aside from the mind-numbing electronics lessons we have to endure with modern cars’ “infotainment” systems? So… logic might say that if you’re going to put the gas cap remote release switch hovering in the area that is near or on the driver’s door, then wouldn’t it make sense to also put the remote trunk/rear hatch switch in the same area? It’s intuitive: both switches operate things that open up in the rear of the vehicle. But noooo. It took me about an hour to find the switch for the electrically-operated rear hatch opener (the owner’s manual was no help): it’s a tiny button squashed in between two interior light switches high up on the ceiling-mounted center console near the front of the sunroof. Why hide it up there?
Lots of small numbers on the nav screen
On the 8.4-inch all-purpose (navigation, HVAC, audio) screen, things that you’d like to know easily and maybe often (e.g., the time of day) are squeezed into small number areas barely distinguishable from numbers for which you have no use. I like the idea that some cars are reverting to analog clocks. There’s a reason for that – they stand out from the digitized world. The Grand Cherokee’s screen and its many uses require you to sit down and fathom what it is that you need (and what you don’t need), then get it to work for you. It will eventually do that, and you may even be happy with it, but it will take some concentration.
Still, what we have here is an expensive utility car (a shade under $70,000), gussied up as a hot rod – and it gets the hot rod’s mileage figures (13/19 mpg, city/highway). There will be a market for that kind of car, (testosterone comes to mind) but there are other cars out there that won’t Walk the Walk or even Talk the Talk, yet will somehow get the job done, albeit without the SRT’s flash and dash. A few other choices: Jeep’s own Grand Cherokee comes in less exotic (and way less expensive) trim and engine levels; Honda, Toyota, Acura, Audi, BMW, Lexus and Mercedes-Benz, among others, all make luxo or near-luxo SUVs that generally start around $30,000 and work their way up toward the $69,470 price of the fully equipped Grand Cherokee SRT, the one we tested.
Alas, not one of those cars is going to crash through those swinging doors at the Big Dog Saloon and belly up to the bar.
The magnificent 2014 jeep cherokee 2014
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