Jeep now have to navigate pollution regs that make traversing the Rubicon Trail look simple
THE VOICEOVER BOOMS OUT A QUESTION that you can’t help but feel contains heavy hints at the preferred answer: ‘Were you born to follow a path or were you born free?’ It accompanies images of the new Jeep Grand Cherokee fording a river and cresting a granite slab.
I’m watching the commercial through a letterbox squint because the television is in front of a huge glass wall, backlit by the Texas sun. But even with eyes tight shut, references to freedom in Jeep’s marketing for the fifth-generation Grand Cherokee would be hard to miss.
Freedom from what? Ten years ago, it would’ve been from the nine-to-five and city streets. Buying a Jeep meant buying an adventure, one enhanced by massive off-road tyres, a cooler full of “lite” beer, and enough gas to leave civilisation behind.
Now things aren’t so black and white. To continue to offer that escape, the Grand Cherokee has to navigate pollution regulations for city use that make traversing the Rubicon Trail—Jeep’s benchmark off-road route in the Sierra Nevada—look simple. Which it also has to do. Hence the “100 per cent freedom, zero emissions” 4xe plug-in hybrid, which can run emission-free officially for 50 kilometres.
To do that it combines a 2.0-litre, turbocharged, four-cylinder petrol engine with a 17.3-kWh (gross) lithium-ion battery that feeds an electric motor. The 272 hp and 400 Nm generated by petrol alone swell to 380 hp and 637 Nm with electricity’s contribution (which also contributes to the 2.4-tonne kerb weight).
You can take this plug-in hybrid out of the city, but can you take the city out of the plug-in hybrid?
