Latest generation of Jeep’s Range Rover Sport rival is exclusively a plug-in hybrid in the UK On sale Now Price from £85,615
Will Nightingale will.nightingale@haymarket.com
WHO INVENTED THE luxury SUV? You’ll get a different answer depending on who you ask, but Jeep certainly believes it was first to market. Not with the Grand Cherokee that we’re reviewing here, but with the Wagoneer from back in the early 1960s. It was on sale in the US more than five years before the original Range Rover was launched in the UK.
The Grand Cherokee is the Wagoneer’s natural successor. It is, in essence, America’s answer to the Range Rover Sport, because it’s a near-five-metre-long SUV that’s designed to cosset you when driving on the road yet also get you to places a mountain goat would think twice about venturing.
In other countries – including the US, where this latest, fifth-generation car has been on sale since 2021 – it’s offered with V6 and V8 petrol engines, but here it’s sold exclusively as a plugin hybrid (PHEV) called the 4xe, which pairs a 2.0-litre petrol engine with an electric motor.
If you’ve fully charged the battery and switched to EV mode, you can theoretically do 30 miles on pure electric power. However, 20-25 miles is more realistic in real-world use – and that’s assuming you aren’t barrelling down the motorway (the Grand Cherokee can do 80mph without any help from its petrol engine).
Choose Hybrid mode and the car will decide for itself when to deploy the petrol engine and when to run on battery power. Assuming there’s charge in the battery, this largely means electric power in urban environments, with the petrol engine firing up to assist on faster roads – particularly when you come to an incline.
This is very noticeable, because the four-cylinder engine is decidedly buzzy – not silky like the six-cylinder engines in rival PHEVs such as the BMW X5 and Range Rover Sport. Although the Grand Cherokee can do 0-62mph in a very respectable 6.3sec, it ultimately isn’t as quick as those rivals, either.
While you wouldn’t expect a luxury SUV to corner like a hot hatch, even by class standards the Grand Cherokee feels heavy and doesn’t like being asked to change direction quickly. It prefers munching miles on long, straight roads to meandering along country lanes.
Thankfully, ride comfort is more impressive. There’s a little more shimmying at high speeds than in the best rivals, but bigger obstacles such as speed bumps are dealt with well.
The Grand Cherokee is even more capable off road. Thanks to standard air suspension
