Other than that classic front grill and round headlights … those things are just glorified hatchbacks with a lift-kit
Glorified hatchbacks with a lift-kit and a cult.
The rubicons do have a good kit and package for off roading, they are rarely used for that when new these days. Locking differentials and thick metal skid plates for example are typically an off road specific feature.
I’ve known several friends who have gone out to buy and own Jeeps … a few with Rubicons … and I have yet to see any of them take them off roading, or even on a rough dirt road. I had one female friend who constantly kept hers shined up and would get terribly upset if any mud or dust accumulated on the paint finish.
The culture has changed. The rubicon has been a package offer for several models and years. Usually its the 3rd or 4th owner that finally takes advantage of the package.
I camp on jeep trails all the time but I’ve never owned a jeep. Currently driving a lifted Subaru. Thinking about a Tacoma for the future.
My hybrid bike has seen more mud in the past month than most trucks will see in a lifetime.
I backed over my neighbors’ flower bed. Does that count?
“Off road” pretty much always means “on crude roads,” and this bothers me more than it should
I’m pretty sure my first gen Subaru Forester with a 1.5" lift has been in more fuckass places than 80% of jeeps ever sold.
So has my Audi A6 Allroad, bone stock. Actually, I think I took my Chrysler 300M to places no shiny new grand cherokee will ever be taken and that’s a low fwd sedan. People used to ask me if it’s been lowered and I told them it was just the factory handling package.
Stock jeeps, besides the wrangler and that pickup thingy maybe, aren’t much good off road anyway. Which is fine because nobody who buys a brand new vehicle goes off roading with it usually. The Grenadier folks may be an exception.
Stock jeeps, besides the wrangler and that pickup thingy maybe, aren’t much good off road anyway.
Eh, I’d add old XJ and ZJ models to that list of exceptions as well. Those things could do some shit. Not quite as good as the Wrangler, but they were also much more reasonable daily driver vehicles, too.
With the back seat folded up, the wrangler is a good daily as long as you’re not commuting far.
I used to daily one, sure.
It’s a usable daily, not sure I’d call it a good one. It’s still highly compromised, poorly insulated, loud, prone to roof leaks, etc.
Mines 15 years old and I haven’t experienced roof leaks, even in car washes. It is loud, not as loud as my MX-5 though. My biggest complaint with the jeep is driving on the highway when it’s windy. That shit is scary AF.
Oh for sure. I mostly meant in terms of new or newish stock Jeeps. Back in the day they actually managed to make a decent SUV.
I have a mk5 rabbit that has been places other 4wd cars with a lich can’t, cuz I’ve hit the mud and my might car slid forward while they lurched into the mud.
To be fair I’ve also had to be yanked out by many a winch, either way … little rabbit loves a trail.
You sound like me - my 20 year old “toy truck” has been offload lots more that most of those garage queens (and looks it).
I don’t look to go off road, sometimes it’s just necessary to get somewhere like a neat campsite, and it can do it.
My first car was a Nissan altima, I pulled apart to get running. I wanted to go off road at a friend’s property, there’s not much difficult terrain, like bouldering or anything, just bumpy and filled with potholes that catch cars every time they hosted large events.
I put a 2in lift kit on it, and after becoming confident it won’t get stuck at my friends house, I got a winch that I could store in the trunk, an extra scissor jack, took that fucker to the woods and tried a few trails popular with jeeps and Subarus.
It’s crazy what kind of stuff you can get up to if you don’t care a ton about the car you’re driving. Eventually put the extra stuff in my pickup, and that car slowly got used less and less until it blew a gasket into cyl 5 and I decided I didn’t want to pull the entire engine apart a second time.
Also more than 90% of pickup trucks.
my 08 outback with no lift and my old 99 tercel base model have been more off-road than 80% of vehicles that people bought because they might need to drive down a maintained gravel road to a parking lot to start a hike
Every person I’ve known that has a Jeep: I LOVE MY JEEP!
Me: You never have any problems with it?
Everyone: Oh yeah, all the time. But it’s a JEEP!
“Just Empty Every Pocket,” or “Just Expect Every Problem.”
Unironically this is just me with arch linux
Btw
For me it has been the exact opposite.Once you’ve set up arch, it just works ™. On pop_os I get constant freezes and on W11 shit just randomly stops working.
Linux is fucking awesome. I can just fix so many of my problems in the terminal.
Unironically this is just me with arch linux btw 2: Electric Terminaloo
I’d rather have 5 problems with a piece of software and being able to investigate/fix them, than have 1 problem and be told “whoopsie doopsie, something went wrong, we made a fucky wucky, go pound sand about it”
That is exactly why I like programming waaay more than IT work.
… At least until the problem turns out to come from some core component in a key library that has yet to be fixed. Though that’s way less common and easier to fix than when piece of canned software wants to get in a slapfight disagreeing with its own documentation…
My parents bought a Chrysler/ Stellantis product to tow their camper after I told them to buy literally anything else. Unsurprisingly it’s a heap of shit.
The engine has a plastic oil cooler - sits in the engine valley, it cracked and leaked oil everywhere at 40k miles. Their plastic intake manifold leaks and sometimes when you start the shitbox there is a strong odor of gasoline 60k. The plastic valve covers leak 70k. Needed an entire front accessory/pulley assembly because the water pump was leaking - made of…plastic 80k. Shocks and struts are shot and causing tread cupping on the tires - 90k. In addition to this, when i drive it around I notice a few things - it’s loud as shit. The engine sounds like it has shit timing or a flat cam or something. Exterior noise is terrible you hear everything. It shifts like an automatic from the 80s and it has 27 gears so it shifts constantly. I’m so sad for them but Dad got a great “deal” on it, I wonder why.
Most Often Parked At Roadside. Company Highly Recommends You Start Learning Engine Repair. Doing Overhauls Daily Gets Expensive. Fix It Again Tony.
I think they might have gone with “Stellantis” because it’s harder to make a derogatory acronym out of
You forgot Really Ain’t Moving.
It’s always been like this. Jeeps famous inline 6 that everyone raves about had the oil filter directly over the alternator so every time you change the oil you spill dirty oil all over the vehicle’s main electrical components. It’s like it was designed by monkeys and no owner has ever seen a Toyota
I’ve got an '11 and have never had any problems.
Like the Alfa Romeo loyalists in Europe. I’ll admit the 156 and 159 series are still nice looking automobiles, but they are rolling junk.
my legs can reach all sorts of places lol, no need to bring a giant piece of metal with me
Sometimes people want (or need) to reach places faster and easier, while hauling more stuff. And, yes, there are other options – bikes, motorbikes, horses, etc – that could also reach places faster and haul more stuff … but in many cases, the off-road car can still get there faster than those and/or haul more stuff.
I do agree that most of the time, off-road cars are dumb. But in the rare niche situation that you actually need one, it’s really great at what it does. (And while it’s ridiculous that so many people who don’t need them buy them anyway and thus get less efficient, less practical cars than they really need … it’s still good that the off-road cars exist for the few who actually do need them.)
There’s also a disability aspect to consider. Yes, your legs can reach all sorts of places … but there are other people whose legs are, unfortunately, not so capable. For those people, an off-road car can give them access to more places where they’d otherwise never be able to go.
And then there’s snow. For people living in places with lots of snow, but also too rural to have reliable snow plowing, a vehicle with some decent off-road capability might be the only transportation they can feasibly use for significant portions of the year.
True… except maybe
places with lots of snow; no reliable snow plowing
People have dag tunnels under snow whenever tall enough. And then they just walk. People usually use Kamchatka, Russia as an example of that, but it happens in other areas as well. Well, that’s the extreme; normally once again people just walk on top. If you are careful enough, you can avoid getting snow in your shoes even when stepping on loose snow. Most of the time you don’t even have to deal with that because (at least where I live) people just silently all agree to shovel out snow on sidewalks they own. On city/company/nobody owned property, “desire paths” of sorts appear rather quickly. Personally saw lots of cyclists on snow, and actually much less cars for obvious reasons.
Well, all of that assuming you are not in north america lul
And what do the disabled people do when the only way to get anywhere is to trudge through the snow?
You mean, the wheelchair kind? People all around will just go “neuron activation” and help. Where do you live where that’s not the norm? Except maybe at night but it’s on them if they decide it’s a good idea.
OR upgrade to a scooter.
I remember when everyone made fun of getting a sports car or muscle car saying it was a way to compensate for a small dick.
I guess folks who drove jeeps wanted in on that particular segment of being made fun of and went hard into it.
Now those of us who do drive fast things are largely left in peace with our tiny peckers.
Everyone should just get what makes them happy and ignore the weird shaming for driving anything other than a standard beige sedan.
Fast cars, off-road cars, big cars, small cars, electric cars, big trucks, custom wrapped/painted cars, ducked out jeeps, w/e.
There are still pressing environmental reasons to shame people for driving very inefficient cars when they don’t need one.
Yeah, I agree on the larger environmental goals and necessity. I suppose what I’m getting at is more of the part that feels like normative pressure and shaming eccentricities. As in, the same thing that has contributed to car colors becoming more and more bland over the years too. There’s a pressure for conformity that pushes people back into their box when they stick a toe out.
I agree in principle, but I do think people should be shamed for endangering others because they want to feel cool. Large SUVs and trucks are much more dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists and such than normal cars.
Sports cars aren’t inherently more dangerous for others unless you fuck with them or drive like a cock.
I don’t think it’s weird for people who are pedestrians, have children, or care about the environment we live in to have some pretty strong opinions on this. Your choice to drive a big ass truck has a real implications for other people that didn’t get to play a part in that decision.
Damn beige sedans! they ruined beige sedans!
…you posted the meme 🤣
I figure it’s mostly in good fun, just banter. You know, like jokes about your cutting edge gaming PC being used for retro games.
What’s wrong with a standard beige sedan?
Infiniti M37x is a delightful beige sedan. Big comfy, quiet, a delight in so many ways.
I’d be a lot more tolerant of people buying whatever they wanted if what they bought wasn’t so goddamn offensive and dangerous
huge, loud, blinding headlights, blocks my view of the road, they always fucking pull up past the stop line so you can’t see if it’s safe to turn right on red, they have to hammer the gas to accelerate decently because they’re massive, they can’t fucking see anything around them because of blind spots and so they are always trying to back into people walking in parking lots, etc
My buddy has a 2010 Rubicon that’s been kicking ass in backwoods Connecticut, which he uses a lot to get back back-and-forth to work, and includes some offroading (he is ag-staff at some fancy person’s country estate). He absolutely adores it.
I see wranglers and Tacoma’s all day on the trail along with modified trucks y’all hate. 🤷♂️
It’s fun to drive these cars, especially top down. It’s always amusing to see nerds get riled up over these.
no one has ever asked me this of my 92, prob do to the 100’s of dents and missing paint.
- Laughs in Opel Corsa A
Real people having to go to real places in the mountains here just use the car they happen to have, usually a small and cheap one.
People still give dodge money 🤣
Jeeps were really innovative when they were created… in World War 2. That’s when they really were off-road vehicles. The pattern was repeated again with the Humvee, or HMMVW. It’s not just converted military vehicles either. It’s also race cars and rally cars. Some series have rules that to be legal a car also has to be a production model. Sometimes if you get that exact model you get a race-capable car. But, mostly the cars they sell are variants of the race design, which maintain the fast-looking design, but one which would handle terribly if you put it on an actual racetrack.
I think a JLTV or Unicorn Stadium Super Truck is where the smart post-collapse money goes.
The JLTV apparently has a curb weight of 6.4 tonnes, that’s almost 4x the weight of the modern oversized F150 at 1.8 tonnes. Not ideal for a post-collapse world where energy is expensive.
Those Stadium Super Trucks though. Also impractical, but those sure are goofy fun to watch.
Any car is no longer practical in a high energy cost world.
Now, a mule OTOH
