Yeah, XJ Cherokees are like cockroaches. Outside of draining the fluids and running it dry, I tried just about everything to kill mine. It's now a mudbog rig that's still running strong.

I guarantee you that every "it's great story" I can find two "that piece of E36 M3, I will never own another one."

Hell, My TJ needed a rear rebuilt at 90K and it was the 4 cylinder with stock tires! Speakers went out, transmission backed out the mainshaft retaining nut...

Now to corroborate your Toyota story I had a 4Runner that tried to kill my wife and kids. Split the rack and pinion. Nice right? All to save a few bucks my not putting the steel retaining ring around the ends.

Jeeps are notorious for snaping front axles, having transmission issues, and rear end issues. I am glad you guys are having great service but that is not the norm.

Remember the automatic transmission ejectors from the minivans?

How about the new Ram axles snapping?

V8 Grand Cherokee radiator failures? Quadra-trak failures?

The point is they push the envelope in design and to make it affordable they cut back on materials. They want to design and build Bentley but they are positioned in the Kia market. I want to like them, I really do, but when I close my eyes those memories, GET THEM OUT OF MY HEAD!!!!

there hasn't been a real Jeep Cherokee built since the early 80's... the late 70's one that my mom had in the late 80's still started up and ran after her boyfriend sunk it into a lake after it broke thru the ice and sat under 20 feet of water for about a week. they just changed the oil and gas and put a new battery in it at the junkyard after it was recovered and started it up.. the junkyard sold the drivetrain out of it and crushed the body..

sadly, i never got to drive that beast since i was only like 11 when mom had it, but it had full time 4 wheel drive and a 360( i think) backed with a 4 speed manual. i don't think Fiat would ever allow such a beast to be built...

In reply to novaderrik:

Those weren't Cherokees, those were rebodied tanks!

Flight Service wrote: In reply to novaderrik: Those weren't Cherokees, those were rebodied tanks!

I don't think they did much modification with those...

Had a Sebring company car, was an ugly/cheap POS but always ran, even with broken motor mounts. Replaced that with a Sebring/200 that was light years better. Never had a problem with it, despite being built during the "we're out of business" period. Now driving a 2wd Jeep Patriot with the CVT, which I expected to hate, and actually love the thing. Other than some creaks in the front suspension, it's been perfect.

Our own '08 Patriot with 110,000 on it now is quiet and solid, but does have the Revell interior they replaced in 2010. I think the struts are about done, but that's to be expected. As someone who wished a fiery death upon his Charger 2.2 back in the 1980s, I've been quite pleased with the service it's given and even impressed with a lot of the engineering.

A GM car, OTOH...no thank you.

And there goes Chrysler. I really like Fiats but they have to rank as one of the worst run automakers in the world.

Dodge/Ram took MT TOTY two years in a row.

Mazda787b wrote:

mad_machine wrote: well.. they can't screw up Chrysler any more than it is?

Maybe when they first took it over. Right now, it's doing pretty well. Things were doing just fine before Mercedes came along (mid-90s). I wonder how things would've played out if Benz hadn't hacked everything up.

Things were only going "well" when MB came along because of the fact that a cheap little car saved the company just prior.....It should have just been allowed to die in the early 80's.

a cheap little car (the neon) that they took the opportunity to axe and replace with an SUV. I liked the neon, I do not like the Caliber

In reply to mad_machine:

No, the K-car saved chrysler in the 80's. Otherwise they would have gone belly up by 1990.

They've had a few good things, a few decent things, and several questionable/stupid things since then. Oddly enough, they still haven't figured out how to keep things from rusting away.

Flight Service wrote: People wonder why the old Honda Motorcycles were so good. Have any of you ever looked in the cases? They were as nice clean and finished on the inside as the painted stuff outside. They took pride and built with quality. That costs money, but it isn't seen. Easy to side step on what isn't immediately seen.

Operative word there is "old", my wife's honda crf was garbage, brand new it needed a tranny and an engine in the first 500 miles of gentle break in. Smoked like a bond car, and popped out of gear to the point it was unridable, what a piece of e36m3 that bike was.

I am a former Chrysler guy. Some family still working there.

DaimlerBenz was purchased by Chrysler at the merger. Basically Chrysler was flush with cash but handicapped by the prior government buyout requirements to single source contracts for decades. The merger allowed Chrysler to get away from some bad suppliers. chrysler did need the vast Capital assets of Daimler to leverage for loans to build newer facilities.

Chrysler quality was and normally has been better than Mercedes Benz. I said quality not fancy tech level. MB used Chrysler to learn mfg quality. I was a part of one of the teams to transfer our robotic quality control processes so they wouldn't keep breaking windshields.

Chrysler volume is small Daimler Benz car production even smaller. So Daimler leveraged Chrysler's volume to get lower cost for their cars and thus higher costs in some cases for Chrysler.

The new Jeep Grand Cherokee is a joint platform with the GLK just like a Sonata/Optima pairing.

Chrysler management lost the politics battle and the Daimler guys took all the $$ and went home.

Then the real assault started when Cerberus came in and just blatantly stole money for non existing service contracts to cousins, sold off as much as they could then sold the scraps to the USA Federal Govt and Fiat.

Fiat has actually been the best thing for Chrysler as they need Chrysler Dodge Jeep SRT and Ram to make up for all of their Fiat losses. So the deeper investment may bode well for my old compatriots. The best thing I heard was an existing Engine Engineering manager say that for the first time in his career there that Science and Engineering are put ahead of politics and pure costROI calculations.

yamaha wrote: In reply to mad_machine: No, the K-car saved chrysler in the 80's. Otherwise they would have gone belly up by 1990. They've had a few good things, a few decent things, and several questionable/stupid things since then. Oddly enough, they still haven't figured out how to keep things from rusting away.

The k car and the minivan changed it all for Chrysler.

Funny that the most production turbo cars sold in the world was a record held by Chrysler Dodge until a few years ago.

Advan046 wrote:

yamaha wrote: In reply to mad_machine: No, the K-car saved chrysler in the 80's. Otherwise they would have gone belly up by 1990. They've had a few good things, a few decent things, and several questionable/stupid things since then. Oddly enough, they still haven't figured out how to keep things from rusting away.

The k car and the minivan changed it all for Chrysler.

This.

Advan046 wrote:

yamaha wrote: In reply to mad_machine: No, the K-car saved chrysler in the 80's. Otherwise they would have gone belly up by 1990. They've had a few good things, a few decent things, and several questionable/stupid things since then. Oddly enough, they still haven't figured out how to keep things from rusting away.

The k car and the minivan changed it all for Chrysler. Funny that the most production turbo cars sold in the world was a record held by Chrysler Dodge until a few years ago.

Sounds about right. Also to add, the LX chassis mopars are actually MB underpinnings. Their computer systems also share the "dynomode" feature to turn every nanny off along with MB.

Advan046 wrote: I am a former Chrysler guy. Some family still working there.

My brother is a retired Chrysler engineer (he was there for 30 years) and he's said pretty much the same thing as Advan046.

ddavidv wrote: words 2wd Jeep more words

BLASPHEMER!!

"All I said was this meal is fit for Jehovah".

Chrysler will stick around, this Fiat pairing is a great thing for them. Fiat appears to actually be interested in R&D rather than ROI.

I certainly hope in the future this pairing does better things than that goofy looking Pro Master van. Commercial customers are not blind.

Anti-stance wrote:

Advan046 wrote:

yamaha wrote: In reply to mad_machine: No, the K-car saved chrysler in the 80's. Otherwise they would have gone belly up by 1990. They've had a few good things, a few decent things, and several questionable/stupid things since then. Oddly enough, they still haven't figured out how to keep things from rusting away.

The k car and the minivan changed it all for Chrysler.

This.

My parents bought an Aspen Stationwagon in 1980 just as the K car was coming out. Chrysler would not have survived 1980 without the Government bailing them out and forcing them to "think small" with the K car.

Sadly Chrysler seems to forget that lesson pretty quickly. Ford and GM still make and market fairly small cars.. but nothing from Chrysler to compete with them

it seems that Chrysler always aims at the low end of the market and "grows" with them... the K car and all of it's derivatives saved the company in the early 80's.. over time, they grew bigger and fancier, with no real cheap reliable entry level car in the lineup any more.. eventually, all the K car stuff gets replaced in the lineup, then after a while they do it again (Neon)and "grow" the entire lineup with the target demo for that car as they mature... now they are in a place where they need to do it again, and maybe they think that Fiat is the answer to that problem instead of doing it in house this time..

that about sums it up. I could never figure out what Chrysler has against small cars. They can build them if forced to, but won't do it willingly. Even the Neon bore out some of that thinking. All you needed to do was sit in the backseat and be faced with manual windows when the front seats got power? I have nothing against manual windows, I like them a lot.. but it seems very odd to have manual and power windows in the same car

In reply to mad_machine:

BecauseChrysler..........

I think Chrysler is going to do just fine.

Surprisingly the new Cherokee is selling well.