Why I am not considering a Jeep.

When I was working for the Grain company, I and another fellow were in charge of ordering company cars.  And one of the favorite cars was the Jeep Grand Cherokee.  The farther up the corporate ladder you were, the more options you could order.  But many folks wrote a check for the options that they wanted, when they didn't otherwise qualify because of their corporate position.

Mostly they ended up purchasing the cars at the end of the lease life anyway.  Usually two years.  They ordered another new what ever they always got, and bought the two year old one for mom at home.  So adding options and paying for them was no biggie as they would end up having the car for 4 years or sometimes 6 or more as the kids would be in line to get mom's at the end of her 2 years.

Now the reason I am telling you all of this is that we routinely replaced transmissions in a lot of these Jeeps.  They would begin to leave spots on the garage floor and then one day the oil would gush over and  that was the day the tow truck had to be ordered.  It seemed to happen right about 50 or 60,000 miles.  The company might own 20 or 30 of these SUV's at a time, so that gave us some extra experience that the average guy didn't get.  Of course we bought the cars at a couple of hundred under invoice too, and they were all leased thru a leasing company.

My CEO had one of the nicest Grand Grand Super Deluxe or what ever they called it.   And one year in the fall, it was right at freezing outside in Des Moines, and raining like cats and dogs.  An ice storm where the trees become so laden that they break down to the ground.  His Jeep became moisture soaked, where the inside of the vehicle was just dripping wet.  The heater didn't overcome the wet for some reason, and then the electrical system began to short out.  He had smoke and it quit running.

Some of us loyal employees had to go after him at one of the clients offices.  It was after dark and the rain kept coming.  We were using 4 wheel drive in the glaze.  The Jeep would start, but wouldn't run well enough to pull the car along.  Then it would buck and spit back into the intake manifold and then die.  He never got out of the parking lot.  It went to the local Jeep dealer on a tow truck hook.

It was at the dealer's garage for three days, before it would start again.  They never did understand what was wrong with the car.  But the CEO would not take the car back.  He switched to a Ford SUV after that.  We ended up selling the 6 month old car on the auction and took quite a loss on the cash out of the lease.

So it is from this experience that I have decided that a Jeep Grand whatever is not in the cards for us here in Kansas City.  I'm sure he must have had a bad engine controller or bad wiring or something, but the transmission problems seemed to be on every other car.

I just wanted to explain that my Jeep experience was founded on real vehicles and how we did with them, not just some attitude that I have decided to express out of the blue.

With that said, I would get a wrangler in a heart beat, especially if it had biiiiig tires and a stick shift.  But I would be ridding in it by myself!!! LOL.

I spent the day with the insurance adjuster looking at all of our damage on vehicles around here.  Then late in the afternoon, I was copying the tax returns to be filed.  I started to write the checks, but somehow got sidetracked.  Uggg.

Retired Rod