Owning an iconic brand must be very trying sometimes. If you dare to do anything new or different, a million people will take to the internet to complain that you’re abandoning your old principles or leaving the classic brand values behind.
A small static display at the launch of the new Jeep Renegade demonstrated why such moaning should be ignored. Parked next to each other were a shiny new Renegade and a gorgeous, Navy blue (as opposed to navy blue) Wills-Overland Jeep of second World War vintage.
Yes, the original Jeep is a true icon of both motoring and history, but you can immediately see that its spartan nature, its cart springs and its lack of either comfort or refinement would render it hopeless in a modern driving environment.
The Renegade could hardly be further removed from that original war-winner. After all, it is based on a small Italian hatchback – many of its oily bits were actually donated by the Fiat Punto – and built in Fiat's sprawling Melfi factory near Turin.
Fiat, of course, has long since merged with Chrysler, Jeep's long-time owner, and so it is that a slice of pure Americana actually has an Italian heart.
You’d never know it from looking at it. The Renegade is squat, stocky and square, as befits a car wearing the Jeep badge. Its styling will doubtless be utterly polarising, and I didn’t have to canvass around much to find many who utterly hate it. Get the colour and specification right though and I think it’s actually rather good looking – purposeful and rugged, rather than ugly.
Spacious inside
The interior is much more conventional, although a rugged Jeep nature is also to the fore here. The plastics and surfaces tend more towards the hard-wearing than the soft touch, but the overall quality (aside from an annoying intermittent rattle on one of our test cars) seems very good indeed.
Jeep is claiming best-in-class cabin space, which seems a trifle unlikely given that it’s aiming right at the very spacious Skoda Yeti, but it’s roomy enough for family duty and likely hardy enough too. The boot is a decent 350 litres and is easily expanded by flipping the backseats flat.
There will essentially be a schism in the Renegade range when it arrives here early next year. On the one hand, there will be the version that Irish customers will actually buy: the 1.6-litre front-drive model with 120hp and 120g/km of CO2.
On the other, there will be the actual star of the range: the expensive but impressively capable 4WD Trailhawk.
The 1.6 is fine though. It steers neatly, rolls only a little and rides with tolerable firmness. It’s not spectacularly sharp to drive but is stable and pleasant. The 1.6 is a touch noisy but has impressive reserves of torque and never leaves you feeling underpowered. It’s also comfortable, with a good driving position – although an inspection of the cramped right-hand footwell on our left-hand drive test car showed that that may not be the case when the steering wheel is swapped over.
Offroader
The Trailhawk is something else again. Higher-riding and able to climb up and down more acute slopes, it packs a 2.0-litre 170hp diesel, a nine-speed automatic gearbox and selectable four wheel drive. It also has Jeep’s Selec-Terrain system which, rather like Land Rover’s Terrain Response, allows you to tweak the car’s settings to deal with mud, sand, rocks or whatever’s under your tyres.
Thus equipped, the Renegade Trailhawk is transformed from school-run-friendly family car into a proper, full-blown offroader. It’s the model that allows the rest of the Renegade range to be properly called Jeep, slipping and gripping through knee-deep mud, clambering over rocks and stones and generally getting itself well stuck into, and then easily pulled out of, a sodden stretch of Italian forest.
Of course, Jeep had carefully chosen the course to best reflect the Renegade’s capabilities, but it was an impressive performance nonetheless.
Will Irish buyers be turned away from their familiar Japanese and European brands by this brash new arrival? However good it is (and it is pretty good, actually) the Renegade will struggle at first, simply because Jeep Ireland’s dealer network is rather thin on the ground at the moment.
It will also have to compete with cheaper in-house opposition from the Fiat 500X which also arrives next year. That car does without much of the Jeep’s engineered-in capability and ability, but that will give it a crucially lower price point. It’s rather like the difference between a watch waterproof to 100 metres or one waterproof to 300 metres: which one do you really need?
It all comes down to how much spare margin you like in your car’s engineering and how much you buy into the storied history of the Jeep brand. Those who appreciate both will find a better-than-decent family SUV.
The lowdown: Jeep Renegade 1.6 Multijet Longitude
Price: About €25,000
Power: 120hp
Torque: 320Nm
0-100kmh: 10.6sec
Top speed: 178kmh
Claimed economy: 5.6l/100km. (50mpg)
CO2 emissions: 120g/km
Motor tax: €200
