EV range for the highway or the trail _ 2022 Jeep Grand Cherokee 4xe.

Hey, so today we are looking at the 2022 Jeep Grand Cherokee 4xe in the middle of nowhere, middle of Texas. And let me tell you, it is hot here, but that does not mean that I'm not thrilled to be sitting next to this car, because this is not a V6 Grand Cherokee, it's not a V8 Grand Cherokee. Instead, this is a plug-in electric vehicle. It has a two-liter turbocharged four-cylinder, but it also has a couple of electric motors and a big battery under the floor, meaning that you can drive this thing 25 miles on electricity alone, and then kickstart that gas motor and really get on your road trip. Now, when Jeep put this vehicle together, the goal was to bring technology, safety, and craftsmanship all together in a fun-to-drive and purely Jeep vehicle. This is supposed to go up those rocks just as easily as it goes down that highway. And before we take a look deep inside this car and figure out if it can deliver the goods, don't forget to subscribe to the CarGurus YouTube channel. And head to CarGurus.com, where you can now sell your vehicle 100% online with CarGurus. Just enter your information, and we'll source the best offer from thousands of dealerships nationwide. Get an offer, have your car picked up, and get paid. It's that easy. Now, the 2022 Grand Cherokee 4xe is instantly recognizable as a Jeep, and a big part of that is, of course, the 7-slot grille. One of my favorite features here is how this is both forward-looking, very progressive, it has active grille shutters, a little bit of technology aimed at fuel efficiency, but it's also kind of old-school. It has that forward lean, something that makes me think of the old Grand Wagoneer. Now, if I'm looking at this, I'm like, you know, is that a 4xe? One of the fastest ways to tell, of course, is the surf-blue recovery points, and if you get a Trailhawk model, you'd also see some surf-blue accents kind of in the trail-rated badge. Down the side, well, let's look at the wheel wells. These are these big U-shaped wheel wells, they're huge, and they can swallow a seriously big wheel. I think these are 20s, you can get 22s on a Grand Cherokee. We also have the two-tone black roof, silver body, you can get that, you know, white body, black roof. It's a two-tone look that's become very popular, if a little played out, but undeniably, pretty handsome. And then, kind of a signature for Jeep these days, we have the American flag badging on the side. I also, I'm really split on how I feel about this chrome strip that runs all the way down, and then down the D-pillar on this Overland trim. I see a little bit of elegance there, but I just don't know if it's for me. I mean, personally, I think it looks great in Trailhawk trim. But, today we are going to start by driving the Overland. So let's hop in, let's take it for a drive, and see how this Jeep handles. One of the most exciting parts about the 4xe powertrain coming to the Grand Cherokee is that it provides V8 levels of performance, genuine V8 levels of performance, but better than V6 fuel economy. So Jeep has rated this powertrain in this vehicle at 375 horsepower and 470 pound-feet of torque, which is a ton. To put that in perspective, that 392 engine Wrangler, the big red fire-breathing dragon of a Wrangler that we drove last summer, that also gets 470 pound-feet of torque, so there is some serious grunt here. But when it's running with an electric battery, we see 57 mpg-e as rated by the EPA. Use up the battery completely, and you still get 23 mpg in combined driving, which compares to 22 mpg in combined driving if you are in a V6 gas-powered Grand Cherokee. That's something to get excited about. Now if you're curious about just driving on electric power, the 17.4 kWh battery pack can provide 25 miles of all-electric range. That doesn't sound like anything you're going to write your grandmother about, but compare it with the Wrangler. Because that car, the Wrangler, is kind of shaped like a brick as it just punches through the air, it only gets 21 miles of electric range, so you actually do a little better in the Grand Cherokee. Aerodynamics, man, they're great. So let's talk about how the Jeep Grand Cherokee 4xe, specifically, how it drives. And the regular Jeep Grand Cherokee is a big, heavy car, and adding a 17 kWh battery does not exactly put it on a diet. This thing definitely feels heavy, it'll move, but you feel it move. Every corner, every curve, it has a little bit of a wallow to it. Some of that is that it's designed with a suspension that's supposed to be comfortable over bumps and potholes and broken pavement and mud and roots and rocks. It's doing what it's designed to do. But it's not going to ride glass smooth like a Rolls Royce as you're ripping around a corner. Now, when I introduced this vehicle, I mentioned safety, so I think it's about time we talked about the safety features available on the Grand Cherokee 4xe. First, there's some great standard stuff. You know, you have automatic emergency braking, you have lane departure warning, you have adaptive cruise control, and then you can add a few things like lane-keeping assist, lane-tracing assist, that effectively give it a level-two, hands-on driver assistance system. Now, Jeep announced to us this morning that they're going to be releasing a level-two-plus, sort of a hands-off but brain-still-on driver assistance system. But worth noting, it requires additional hardware, so you can't buy a Grand Cherokee 4xe this weekend and then just get a software update in October and suddenly get level-two-plus driving assistance. It's not going to work that way. When talking about the design of the Grand Cherokee, particularly on the interior, Jeep really hammers this idea of contrasting beauty, or beauty in contrast. And you can see it. It's all over the place. It does look really good. So a clear example of it is all the way, you know, from the door across the dash, including on the wheel, all the way to the other door, we have these thin metal accents that are complemented by a dark, contrasting wood. It looks terrific. Also, the seats were...I'm sitting on this seat that's upholstered in a color called Steel Gray. It looks just delightful, particularly in how it contrasts with the dark wood. I also like how there's just this little white piping just on the headrest. Very subtle contrast compared with some more, like, brass contrast stitching on the seats and the armrest here. That really kind of draws your eye in. I'm not always a huge fan of contrast stitching, but I like it in the Grand Cherokee. Some of the things I don't like, well, this, you know, light-colored material down here, it's really plasticky. I can live with a little bit of plastic, particularly in a Jeep. You know, you're gonna get it dirty, no matter how much it costs, it's meant to get dirty. But it doesn't have to feel or sound quite like this. They make kind of rubberized plastic materials that you find in all sorts of vehicles. That would be better. A few other details on the interior that I think will probably make your life a little more comfortable are, well, for one, I mean, there's the space. Just plain and simple, the 2022 Grand Cherokee is larger on the inside than the previous generation. So you've got plenty of legroom, plenty of headroom. Frankly, it looks like a good family car. There are also some details like the charging light indicator up top and the charge indicator on your driver display that are gonna make it really easy to know just how much battery you've got. And then there are the touch points. So I love the feel of the rotary shifter. It's kind of metal with this textured finish on the sides. And similarly, we've got metal toggles here for the select terrain controls and the ride height adjustment. These feel great. I do think there's a bit too much piano black plastic in the center stack here. It's an absolute fingerprint magnet. And I don't know, it's very dark, but the script on it is very light, very thin lines. So it can be a little tricky to see exactly what button you're searching for if you're trying to press. That's the type of thing, though, that once you've bought this car, lived with it for a few weeks, driven it for a few weeks, it's all gonna be second nature. You'll know where the seat heater is. Just don't loan it to your neighbor because they'll never figure out how to turn that thing off. I mean, we've got some cows in the road up here, so I gotta drive a little carefully. They're literally crossing the road. Anyways, the Trailhawk Trim is the grand Cherokee 4xe that you buy when you're genuinely going to take it off-road. Now, interestingly enough, you don't need the Trailhawk to do some pretty impressive things off-road in this vehicle. For instance, I'm still driving an Overland Trim, it says so on the seats here, but it has some of the features that would normally be standard on a Trailhawk. They'd be optional on a non-Trailhawk grand Cherokee 4xe. A fine example of this is the Quadralift air suspension, which will lower it to very accessible in-and-out height, has kind of an aero mode for when you're on the highway, or it can lift way up there to give you a true off-road height. Jeep has also added a quick-down function, so you can drop from that off-road height to the very accessible in-and-out height in seven seconds. That's really impressive. Another feature, and you're actually going to find a version of this on virtually every grand Cherokee, is the Select Terrain System. Now on this one here, we have rock, sand and mud, snow, auto, and sport. You don't necessarily get all of those if you're getting a base level, but if you get a Trailhawk, you're going to see all of that, and essentially what it does is it remaps kind of some of the engine behavior so that it is best suited for crawling up rocks or kind of digging through the mud and the snow and maintaining traction when you need it. It's actually really impressive technology when you're using it. Standard is Quadra Track 2, which is kind of Jeep's not-quite-base-level, but more impressive, not top-of-the-line off-road system. If you get the Trailhawk, you actually get Quadra Drive 2, which is a top-of-the-line system. It has a low range, it has rock crawling, a two-speed electronic transfer case, it has electronic limited-slip differential on the rear axle that can actually send 100% of the power to either one of the rear wheels. It will get you where you need to go. Now, if you need to tow something, it is worth noting that while the 4xe has a 6,000-pound maximum towing capacity, which is pretty impressive, that is less than the V6 Grand Cherokee's 6,200 pounds, and it's a fair bit less than the V8-powered Grand Cherokee's 7,200 pounds. I really like how Jeep handles its infotainment, and I have for a long time. This year, we still have an incredibly crisp display, but there's some functionality here that I think is really, really cool. Obviously, we have things like Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. They're wireless in the Grand Cherokee, although I don't have a wireless charger, and my phone's almost dead, so I'm plugged in. You also have this interesting My Pages setup, where you can kind of customize what you want and how you want it to look. So you just hit this My Pages, you hit Add a Page, and then it gives you a number of layouts. Say we want to do four here, and then I can add widgets. So I want to look at what's playing, and I want to know my seat heat situation, and I want to add a widget for the suspension, and oh, what the hey, let's go with the charging schedule summary as well. So now, if that's the stuff that's important to me, I just have to swipe over to that. I think that's really, really impressive. It's that kind of customization that makes it feel like your car, not a rental car, not a nice car, but you know, with some frustrating things, it feels like your car. Other details that I really like, well, I mean, I cannot not talk about the Macintosh stereo. This thing is incredible. We listened to it in our Wagoneer review, and I said that, but we have the 19-speaker Macintosh system, and it is sublime. Simply put, you have not lived until you have cranked Tina Turner in a Wagoneer. I feel the exact same way about, apparently, Joe Russo's almost dead. The big question for a lot of shoppers is going to be, is the Grand Cherokee 4xe actually good value? I mean, this is not necessarily a mass-market car with a mass-market price tag anymore. In fact, this Overland trim, this one has an as-tested price north of $74,000. That is a lot of cash. But this can do a lot of things that other vehicles in this class simply can't do. For one, it has the off-roading capability. Even an Overland trim. We took a Trailhawk out there, but this will go places that other two-row crossovers simply can't go. And then, of course, there is that plug-in hybrid functionality. The ability to drive 25 miles on electric power alone, well, that's going to be a huge cost-saving for a lot of commuters, particularly if your commute is less than 15, 10 miles. So let us know in the comments section below what you think. Is this car priced right? Is it just a fact of life that these things are going to get more expensive? And at least here, you're getting some real capability and functionality. Tell us in the comments section below, and then head to CarGurus.com to read our full written review. We can't wait to hear from you, we can't wait to see all those subscriber clicks, and we'll see you next time.