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CGI-Revived 2025 Jeep Comanche 4xe Feels Ready to Plug Into the Compact Truck Sector

Long considered obsolete, uninteresting, and left for dead by automakers dwelling around the North American region, the compact pickup truck sector has revealed it should not have been abandoned in the first place. And those who dared to be mavericks quickly reaped what they saw.
2025 Jeep Comanche 4xe PHEV CGI revival by Digimods DESIGN 9 photos
Photo: Digimods DESIGN / YouTube
2025 Jeep Comanche 4xe PHEV CGI revival by Digimods DESIGN2025 Jeep Comanche 4xe PHEV CGI revival by Digimods DESIGN2025 Jeep Comanche 4xe PHEV CGI revival by Digimods DESIGN2025 Jeep Comanche 4xe PHEV CGI revival by Digimods DESIGN2025 Jeep Comanche 4xe PHEV CGI revival by Digimods DESIGN2025 Jeep Comanche 4xe PHEV CGI revival by Digimods DESIGN2025 Jeep Comanche 4xe PHEV CGI revival by Digimods DESIGN2025 Jeep Comanche 4xe PHEV CGI revival by Digimods DESIGN
Back in 2015, at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Michigan, a South Korean automaker was the first courageous soul to test the US waters with a proposal for a modern four-door compact pickup truck. The concept was named Santa Cruz, and Hyundai pondered for over half a decade if the company was doing the right thing when trying to recapture customers' love for pocket-sized workhorses. Based on the same platform as the quirky NX4-generation Hyundai Tucson, the little Santa Cruz was revealed in spring 2021 for the 2022 model year, and the company even decided they should build it locally at the Montgomery, Alabama (HMMA) plant.

However, so far, the Hyundai Santa Cruz has turned out as a lost unibody compact pickup truck bet. Not because the model needs to be cooler to garner hype around it. Instead, the indecision to put it quickly into production gave rivals enough time to think of a potential measured response. And since Ford was the only one to bring theirs to market, the 2022 Maverick revival turned out a spectacular win in terms of sales – mainly because the Hermosillo, Mexico-built competitor, was cheaper and had a standard hybrid powertrain. Now, the Ford Maverick rocks the market in terms of deliveries, quarter after quarter.

Naturally, that means more competitors will rethink their decision to refrain from jumping on the unibody compact pickup truck boat for a river party. According to the rumor mill, we heard Toyota plans to rekindle its affection for Stout little workhorses with a revival of the nameplate. On the other hand, the imaginative realm of digital car content creators has other fish to fry. For example, Dimas Ramadhan, the virtual automotive artist behind the Digimods DESIGN channel on YouTube, has taken up the task of revealing a reinvented Comanche - in CGI, all over again.

As it turns out, this is not the first time the pixel master dreamt of bringing back the MJ Comanche pickup truck variant of the XJ-series Jeep Cherokee compact SUV. Initially, the models produced between 1985 and 1992 for model years 1986-1992 were two-door trucks with six-foot (1.83 meters) and seven-foot (2.13 m) cargo bed lengths. But the CGI expert's initial vision looked like the European (all-electric) Jeep Avenger went to the US for a lucrative business visit and spawned an offspring after meeting an off-duty, best-selling Ford Maverick.

Now, though, the unofficial Jeep Comanche revival has other, better plug-in hybrid coordinates to potentially tackle the electrified Ford Maverick. Plus, the design is also much better in terms of Jeep brand integration, and we can even see that it supposedly has a few tricks up its sleeves – like additional storage elements on the body, among other things. So, do we give it our CGI hall pass and hope that Jeep will approve of a smaller sibling for the mid-size Gladiator to mitigate the danger of a three-way Maverick vs. Santa Cruz vs. Stout battle? Or are these renderings simply wishful thinking, and we do not approve the Comanche PHEV project because it needs more digital refinements?

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About the author: Aurel Niculescu
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Aurel has aimed high all his life (literally, at 16 he was flying gliders all by himself) so in 2006 he switched careers and got hired as a writer at his favorite magazine. Since then, his work has been published both by print and online outlets, most recently right here, on autoevolution.
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