We have to start by handing the Jeep Wrangler a trophy for entering the all-time automotive hall of fame. This is one of those cars that remain in the history books, a vehicle that has done for off-roading what, for example, the MINI has done for urban transportation.
But while many motoring icons were born out of dreams, the Wrangler came to the world to serve the army. The Wrangler’s roots take us to the origin of the Jeep designation, which comes from the G.P. abbreviation that stands for “General Purpose”.
Like any good soldier, the predecessors of the Wrangler were created with blood, sweat and tears, as the US army required quite a large number of prototypes to be built and tested against another carmaker’s offer, so basically the two companies had to supply the army with many examples of their cars, refine them so that they pass the various stages of the testing process, all without having any guarantee that they’ll get the contract.
Fast-forwarding to contemporary times, the Wrangler has been gifted with modern features, but still keeps its basic hardware, which offers it an aura of invincibility. Long story short, this was a military vehicle that, over the years, has made more an more compromises in order to also be suitable for road use. But can you really drive a Wrangler everyday?
We set out to answer this question by inviting a two-door Wrangler fitted with a 2.8-liter turbodiesel engine to visit our test drive section. We asked the Wrangler to do just about everything for us, from shopping in a crowded city to taking us past some mountains so that we could get to the beach that was waiting to see how well it gets along with the sand. Let’s see how it coped with all this.
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