I had the opportunity to drive a new Jeep Wrangler manual with removable hard panels about 5 years ago. Our friend group included a Jeep rep who got to drive a new one every few months and would loan them to us, sometimes weeks at a time. One of our friends destroyed the clutch because she didn't know how to drive a manual. I gave her some instruction, but she's just an aggressive driver that doesn't try to work with the machine. Same girl that goes through auto transmissions because she treats the accelerator as an on/off switch. She wanted me to continue her training in my Acura and I refused. She's got a C-Max now, so hopefully that holds up to aggressive driving.
I did use low range on the Liberty I briefly owned to go up an extremely steep and bouldery path to the top of a hill. It was steep enough that my not-yet wife yelled at me to stop and then buried her head in her lap when I continued on. When we got to the top she thought that was the greatest. I had thrashed up the hill long before in my Subaru Legacy taking a running start and flooring it the whole way, and taking the boulder strikes to the underside. Anyhow, that was fun using the Jeep as it was intended.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Plasmajab
There's a few different kinds of jeep owners.. One is the kind that buys a jeep because they want that all-weather convertible that loves the look and style of the jeep. This crowd buys a jeep because they want a jeep because its a jeep, they don't care much about the fuel economy of the jeep because they want a jeep.
Another crew of jeep owners are the true jeep owners. The ones that use the jeep for its jeep capability. Rock climbing, offroading, trailrunning, mudding. At low speeds, they really don't care about the fuel economy either.
The last group of jeep owners are the "mall crawlers". This rare breed of jeep owners are kind of like the first group, but they add on all sorts off offroad bits to make the jeep more capable but never leave the hard stand.
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Thanks for the detailed reply, it's very illuminating.
The JD Power survey did find that Wrangler owners are much less concerned than other compact SUV owners about fuel economy (30% vs 67%). It's surprising to me that 2/3rds of people still list fuel economy as a first consideration when buying a compact SUV. Perhaps the fact that it's a compact rather than full-size is their compromise?
It also says 70% of Wrangler owners are men (vs 50%), so that probably explains a whole lot as far as projecting an image and accepting the cost of doing so for that mall segment of owners.
A common mantra I heard on the Jeep forum was "you gotta pay to play". That was the response whenever someone asked how to improve fuel economy. Same response when things broke that needed fixing.