Originally Posted by
NightTrain
Full time 4x4? What a stupid idea. That thing is going to get 10 mpg at best with that Hemi.
We have a Jeep Compass, and it's a really nice rig with a 9-speed tranny getting 30 mpg average - pretty great for an SUV. However, since Fiat bought Chrysler/Jeep, the longevity of the components is plummeting.
Right about 20k miles, the engine started eating oil... I suspect a stuck or broken ring, so they replaced the whole engine. I went down and picked it up, and it wouldn't go into drive - it was hung somewhere in neutral. I got it to go into drive by thumping the selector, but that wasn't right. It's all fly-by-wire these days, so it wasn't a maladjusted cable.
They couldn't figure it out, because it was an intermittent problem - but the code it was generating was telling the mechanics to change out the tranny. They scheduled it, and Corporate came back nixing that idea and instead installed a suite of new sensors to the tranny. Still happened occasionally, took it back, mechanics couldn't figure it out or duplicate it. Weirdly, it hasn't happened in the last couple of months, so maybe that gremlin sorted itself out.... but my experience with self-healing inanimate objects is right about zero success rate, it's only waiting for a most inopportune time to manifest itself with a vengeance.
Then about a month ago, the wife and I drove to Fairbanks mostly for the hell of it, to get out of the house. For some reason I selected the Nav system, and it showed us about 400 miles West of our actual position, doing laps in the middle of a large lake. We drove North another 200 miles before reaching Fairbanks, and the Nav system had us in the same lake, going in circles. I tried resetting the computer by doing the old-school 3 tight turns left/3 tight turns right but no joy. The next day we drove back home, and this time the Nav showed us 100 miles East of the highway doing circles out in the middle of nowhere.
That Nav system is part of the entire electronics suite of the Jeep. It controls everything except the driver controls. It can't be fixed, so they're going to rip that dash apart and put in a whole new cluster... one of them said that's worth $6k just for the unit, not counting the considerable amount of labor to swap it out. That also might explain why it always thinks that both FOB batteries are low.
It's sad to see an American company being driven into the ground (!)... I really hope Fiat gets their shit together or better yet, selling Chrysler/Jeep back to Americans. Italy makes Ferrari and Lamborghini, but neither are known for their reliability. Fiat has always been a joke in that regard, too.
Instead of worrying about what Ford is doing, I think they'd be wise to fix their existing issues, of which there are many. I'm fed up with it.