Going Off-Road In Moab With An EV Jeep Wrangler | Easter Jeep Safari 2022 | Car and Driver VLOG

Okay Dan, you just turned on night vision mode. I did, but it also lets me see the hot spots. Look, you've got the tailpipe glowing, you've got the differential, so there's some heat in there, and then a little bit less, it's not quite as bright, the tire treads. And then there's a haze underneath the entire vehicle, so there's some heat projecting downwards. That's wild. It's bizarre. So if I stand in front of it, it would be like a heat map then? Yeah. All right. It looked like a ghost. So we're here in Moab, Utah for the Easter Jeep Safari, and we're going to look at some concept vehicles that Jeep brings out every year, although it's different ones each time, different concepts. And there's also a featured vehicle that they have a drive for, and that's what we're in now. This is the Grand Cherokee 4xe, which is an appetizer for things to come. We're in the middle of a drive route right now, and I gotta say, it's beautiful. Well, 4xe is going to mean a lot of things as Jeep moves forward. Right now, in terms of this Grand Cherokee and also the Rubicon, the 4xe is a plug-in hybrid, which means it is kind of a nice in-betweener electric vehicle for those people who might worry about range anxiety. Plug-in hybrid has a gasoline engine, behaves like a regular car on gasoline, or you can plug it in and put electricity in its battery to the tune of, I think in this case, it's EPA rated at 25 miles of electricity, which doesn't sound like much, but if you think about it, how many miles do you drive in a day? In the perfect conditions, you're going to be charging it at home, so every morning you wake up with a full battery. And if you don't drive more than 25 miles a day, which is most people most of the time, it might just feel like an electric vehicle Monday through Friday. Now, if you want to go on a road trip, you don't have to worry about range or charging because you've got the gasoline engine. So you can drive to a place like Moab on that and not worry about trying to figure out plugging it in or anything like that. Okay, this is wild. The Grand Cherokee is in full electric mode at the moment, completely silent as we're off-roading. It's a weird experience so far. Right. It feels like we're coasting. Yeah, it does. It feels like we're coasting. EVs always feel like that. We're the first ones to use it today, so we've got all the battery power we need. All right, check it out. So we start this thing off in third gear. What do we do? So I'm in Magneto 2.0, which is the second iteration of the Jeep Wrangler electric concept vehicle. This is all electric. Now it's been reconfigured to make 625 horsepower and 850 pound-feet of torque. Some other stats, 20-inch wheels, 40-inch tires, Dana 60 front axles, Dana 80 rear axles. They've added 12 inches to the frame and the body in order to fit a six-speed Tremec manual transmission from a Hellcat. Because of all the extra torque, they needed a beefier transmission. But they needed it even beefier than the way it comes from the factory, so they've hardened the gears. And the end result is a really cool it's actually, even though it's a concept, it's called the Jeep 41, it doesn't have that many parts on it that are that unusual. I mean, the concept of the flat green paint, you know, and the army stenciling is pretty cool. But what it also has that's really neat is it has a tan soft top. It has half doors. And I love the half doors because they really make the character line of the rear part of the Jeep just blend in to the doors. This is a plug-in hybrid with a 2-liter turbocharged gasoline engine and an electric motor that's built into the 8-speed transmission where the torque converter would normally go. You get, I can't remember the number of miles, the 4xe Grand Cherokee is 25. I think this is a little less than that because it's a little bit heavier, but we'll have to verify that. My memory isn't very good today, and I have no internet service out here, so I can't fact check myself. The Jeep 41 concept is pretty cool because it's pretty close to a Wrangler Unlimited that you could build with just a few parts. It's got a Mopar 2-inch lift with Fox shocks. They also put a Fox steering stabilizer on it. Of course, the Rubicon comes with lockers and a disconnecting front stabilizer bar, so that's taken care of. Well, what else does it have? Oh, the coolest thing. The coolest thing is the wheels. If you look at these wheels, they look like steel wheels, but they're alloys, and they're painted to match the body. And then they're wrapped with 35-inch tires, which is why the 2-inch lift is here. But yeah, this is a pretty neat thing you could do yourself without really breaking the bank that much. Day two out in Moab. The Jeep let us take a Rubicon Wrangler 4xe and let us go out and have some fun on our own. Yesterday was kind of the pre-programmed event, you know, with all the concepts and stuff. All right, so what trail are we on today and where are we going? I think this is called Long Holden, and it goes up to the Island in the Sky Mesa. It passes Dead Horse State Park on the way, and when we get to Island in the Sky, we'll be in Canyonlands National Park. From there, what we're going to do is jog over to Schaefer Canyon and go down. It's a really tight switchback back down into the lowlands. We're going to go to the White Rim Jeep Trail and hit that up for a few miles, and then continue down Schaefer Canyon to Thelma and Louise Point. See what that's all about. Okay, it's gonna be real fun. Dan, this is awesome, man. Great choice of trail. More of an overlanding type trail, but you know what? Pay it off. It's the scenery. There's still a bit of snow on the ground still. Yeah, that was last night. There was snow at our hotel when we woke up. It all melted off, but up just around the corner. If I'm not mistaken, we're going to see something really cool. Really? I don't know if it's this corner or the next corner, but you know how corners Sky District, and right after we make the next corner or two, the world is going to fall away, and it's going to be a really epic descent. Yeah, so this is my first time here. I'm super excited to see what's going on. I'm probably going to be freaked out because I'm not driving, but you know, have. It's pretty hair-raising. Pretty much the same sort of thing. That's why I like Moab better, because it is basically the Grand Canyon, but you can drive. Oh yeah. You can go off-roading anywhere. There's so many off-road trails here, and you know, this is the Easter Jeep Safari weekend. It's not crowded at all here. It is Moab proper, but not right here, and we're only a few miles out of town.