Photo: Matt's Off Road Rescue / YouTube screenshot
When you buy a Jeep, you owe it to the world to take it out for a bit of adventuring. However, it's best to remember that not all vehicles with a seven-slot grille are created equal, so you need to temper your expectations accordingly depending on whether you got, say, a Renegade or a Wrangler Rubicon.
Off-road newbies think that the ultimate test for a 4x4 vehicle is to take it rock-crawling, but while that may be true in terms of ground clearance, skid plates, and approach and departure angles, other scenarios don't look nearly as extreme but will test an SUV's limits just as much.
Take mud, for instance. You can try to cross a muddy field with the world's most capable off-road rig; if it's not equipped with the right tires, it'll get stuck after only a few feet. It's not that the vehicle isn't capable of dealing with the situation; it's just that it's not properly equipped.
The Jeep Compass is definitely not the most off-road-worthy Jeep, but it's still one of the very few vehicles in its segment that offers full-time four-wheel-drive as well as various settings for its traction control system depending on the surrounding conditions (the classic, snow, sand, mud, etc.). That means it should be able to cope with most of the challenges a reasonable owner might subject it to, with driving over sand being one of them.
But when the sand is soft and deep, and the car's wheels dig in and beach the SUV on its belly, there's very little any traction control system can do. It's when a winch can come in handy, provided you have something to tie it to. Letting some air out to increase the tire patch also helps, but it's actually more useful when trying not to end up in this situation rather than getting out of it.
However, as if being stuck in the sand wasn't bad enough, this particular Jeep Compass decided to make things even more difficult for the driver and his passenger. Well, not the entire car, but actually just a tiny part of it: the electronic parking brake.
For some reason known only to Jeep, the damn thing seemed to come on whenever they tried to accelerate the out of the hole it had dug for itself. The owner was so confused that when Matt, the person they called to the rescue, asked whether the vehicle was stuck or broken, they didn't even know what to answer.
In the end, it proved to be one of the easier rescues—but not as easy as the second one in this clip. That one didn't even require the use of a rescue vehicle, only someone behind the wheel and another person giving the van a little push. Some people just don't like to help themselves.
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