2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo V6 4×4 – Road Test « New and Used Car Listings

2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo V6 4×4 – Road Test

A tarantula hawk is not a hawk, but a giant wasp that lives in California’s deserts. An expectant female can be up to four inches long, and when the time comes, she pounces on the nearest tarantula, which is also native to deserts lit orange at night by the glow of Los Angeles. She paralyzes the spider with her half-inch stinger, then drags the prostrate arachnid to an underground lair where she lays a single white egg on it. The egg hatches after five days, and the infant wasp dines on its hapless victim for about a month, craftily saving the organs for last so that the spider remains alive—and fresh.

As luck would have it, we did not encounter any four-inch-long wasps while testing the 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee, which is fine because a tarantula hawk’s sting rates on the Schmidt Sting Pain Index as feeling “blinding, fierce, shockingly electric, [like a] running hair dryer has been dropped in your bubble bath.”

However, while driving our $38,785 Grand Cherokee Laredo 4X4 from San Francisco to Los Angeles, we did explore a few out-of-the-way places where green mountains thrust skyward and condors soar, where the ocean laps sand soft enough to trap wimpier SUVs, and where the pinyon pines and the purple nightshades hide rav­enous ticks who like to crawl up a car photographer’s leg while he’s composing a shot.

In other words, places where nobody who spends the same sum of money on a car will ever go.

And that’s the point of buying a Grand Cherokee. To see places and meet bugs you can’t in other vehicles. From the moment former Chrysler exec Bob Lutz drove the very first Grand Cherokee through a plate-glass window at the 1992 Detroit auto show—folks still talk about it—the GC (as compared with the iconic Wrangler) has amounted to five seats in an up-trimmed wagon that is equally ready for the mall or an off-road maelstrom.

However, Jeep’s product planners admitted to us at the San Francisco introduction that no more than five percent of owners ever leave pavement. That fact has been discussed and debated over the years by the company’s various overlords. The 2011 Grand Cherokee started development five years ago at DaimlerChrysler, continued during Cerberus ownership, and was finished under Fiat management. We’re told that various suits along the line mentioned that if all Grand Cherokees weren’t overbuilt to survive the Rubicon Trail, they would tally fewer pounds than the hefty 4772 our lightly optioned V-6 Laredo weighed and, thus, return something better than the 19 mpg average we observed.