Gadgetory

it's the top of the line of the top of the line for Jeep this ain't no CJ let's drive the 2014 Jeep Grand Cherokee summit and check the tech you can spot a 2014 Grand Cherokee by the face revised rather notably but beyond that the Grand Cherokee carries on as something of the American Land Rover big clean and bold without a lot of that world war 2 bric-a-brac that doesn't make a lot of sense to buyers under 40 anymore except for some little tiny since 1941 call-outs you'll find on the headlights and the steering wheel they just can't help themselves now right as you get inside this guy you realize it's about as spacious as you thought it was going to be as you approached its bulkiness walking to it plenty of good Headroom and I'm not even nearly at the bottom of the seat travel as you can see this isn't the CJ Jeep of back in the day this has become the biggest bushwa rock crawler in the market but they're meant to be luxurious that's what Grand Cherokees do in the Jeep lineup let's get right to our center stack technology this is what you probably notice right off the bat in this very nicely almost - nicely appointed cabin this is a Garmin oriented nav system to begin with you recognize that right away because it has the familiar where - that's Garmin language it's rated as one of the easiest to use in the entire auto industry once you do get your navigation set or just browsing the map it's one of the nicer looking ones street names are always quite legible as are the legends for traffic and such or direction of street it's a little doughy and a little bit soft once you do min well enough you can read it very well onto the media now AM and FM radio both have HD radio and it's well documented here you've got an HD button indicator there on the right and once you get into the FM HD where you often will find secondary or even tertiary stations it's very easy to bounce between them you just hit next and it goes from HD 1 to HD 2 Sirius XM of course satellite radio standard on this car as well does a really nice job of calling out that particular kind of media with good channel art great meta tags and they use all the real estate I almost rarely see a station name or a title that has to rotate or go you know piece by piece now like old-school thinking they still put media under a separate bucket and that's where you'll find your iPod connection SD card is one you're probably not going to use so often but again meta and album art do a good job as good as you did on the card and of course bluetooth streaming with meta tag information again you've also got an aux jack and by the way all that stuff lives down here in this bin in the front in the back there are two more USB Jack's but don't get excited those are not for media those are USB charging jacks fewer technology touches I want to call your attention to four we go to the hood interesting very electronic very modern very non Jeep to be honest shifter down here that controls the 8-speed automatic now down here are your drivetrain control systems and what's a fairly ambitious and sophisticated undercarriage because we have the four wheel drive version not all of these are this is honestly kind of taken out of a page from Land Rover that had this thing pretty early on but you just rotate then up and it does all the thinking for you for setting up how the four-wheel drive works from snow to sand to let it figure out as conditions change and then we have mud and rock you also see how the air suspension has different ride heights you can invoke those if you want in fact the levels go from entry exit which the car only does when it's parked to arrow for being on the highway to off-road one an off road to high and higher and then you can push it into four-wheel drive low right here that by the way is even lower than it used to be on the Grand Cherokee now a forty four to one low range ratio super crawl on that guy and you've also got descent control right here to get down a hill using its smarts and not your foot last bit of cool tech in this cabin is the center display on the instrument panel notice we've got attack on the left temp and fuel gauges on the right those are all real gauges mechanical but in the middle there is an LCD as is current fashion on higher trim cars you connect apps now not a lot going on here yet you've got Bing search a bunch of remote telematics you can do from your smartphone and a hotspot which functions as proof that car makers want a piece of the mobile bandwidth explosion it cost anywhere from 10 bucks a day to 35 bucks a month to activate the jeeps built-in hotspot and when you do it's only 3G now the first thing I noticed when I get in the engine bay without reading a single speck is that I know there's a Hemi v-8 option because you got about enough room in front of this v6 to put one of those micro-apartments they're doing these days so yes you can get two more cylinders on the front that's another video we have the 3.6 liter variable valve train v6 one of their Pentastar motors this guy doesn't do any particular trickery but delivers 290 horsepower 260 foot-pounds of torque good enough to move this basically five thousand pound vehicle up to 60 in about seven and a half seconds while delivering that bad 17:24 MPG in 4x4 trim what's also interesting to me is there's a diesel a turbo diesel option for the first time on this guy it's an Italian motor sourced by you know the parent company of Chrysler Fiat but it adds $5,000 to the sticker price even though it gets up to 30 on the highway I couldn't earn that back in my lifetime now around town where you're gonna spend 99% of your time in this Jeep the driving is it is a truck you don't forget that between the kind of numb throttle response the bouncy Jhansi ride and the thing you don't find anymore on a lot of vehicles which is high profile tires relatively so this is like driving one of those foam pillows power is great this is a really nice v6 engine and it comes on really well but it's blanketed in a bunch of other BS that just tends to mute its responses sport mode does wonders to cure a lot of that but it's actually too high-strung for most drivers to use every day it's it holds the gear a really long time and it's going to piss you off because it's just too much noise and too much worrying going on unless you're really into it and then the suspension lets you down so there's no happy medium in this thing now we have adaptive cruise control which also has a forward collision warning which will get in there and mitigate the crash you activate that just by turning on cruise and then you have these two buttons here that rather cartoon Allah show you distance greater or distance less and if I set this right here and I set my speed and I set my distance it seems to be very well reading the road in front of me but I got to tell you in the end driving this Grand Cherokee I just feel like I took a nice off-road vehicle and I suburban eyes dit too much it's been defamed maybe that's just me but I think an off-road vehicle with this kind of credentials should be a little more pure instead of swaddled in all this stuff but this is America who am i kidding juniper Grand Cherokee CNET style is pretty easy just bring 52 gram you order the summit trim level that we have at about 49,000 and then add four-wheel drive for 3,000 more skip nonsense like the optional backseat blu-ray system and tell your kids to just roll down the window that thing out there is called a tree