Back From The Grave

It appears as though Jeep is going to relaunch their old Wagoneer and Grand Wagoneer models in the near future.

Now before anyone starts setting off the fireworks celebrations, let me say up front that the relaunched vehicle will not resemble this, in any way, shape or form.

More’s the pity.  And the odds are good that it will emerge from the wind tunnel looking just like the current Jeep SUV line, or else it will resemble its predecessor in the same way that the New VW Beetle resembled the Old VW Beetle (i.e. not much, and uglier).

I’m taking bets…

And for the record:  when Jeep announced back in the mid-80s that they were going to discontinue the Wagoneer, I came thisclose to getting one.

9 comments

  1. You are 99.9999% correct in the probability the new Wagoneer will resemble everything else currently in the Jeep line-up. Saw a write-up the other day about the new Chevy Blazer that is coming out and disappointingly it too looks like all the other stuff in that line up.

    Is it just me, that it seems like just about everything now a days is going insane?
    More and more businesses, large and small, are behaving in a suicidal manner.
    Surely other people are noticing this too.
    If you have, what do you suppose is behind all of it.

  2. Great. YAF (Yet another Fiat) on the road….

    As the former owner of 5 Jeep products (3 Mil Surplus, M38/M38A1/M170), a Cherokee and a CJ6) there is no way in hell the modern Fiat products should be called Jeeps.

  3. According to the link, Fiat is looking toward the high-end luxury SUV market and planning to price these at $140k or more. Apparently they’ll be in direct competition with Land Rover and those Mercedes things I see rich people driving. Which means I’ll never see the inside of one, unless my retirement includes working at the full-service car wash for extra change.

    I’m getting close to the age where my next vehicle may well be my last vehicle, assuming I chose wisely. And right now I’m more willing to drop $20k cash or more to simply rebuild to factory specs some 20-30 year old truck than I am to buying a new one. Jeep’s missing an opportunity, but I guess as long as they have the brand name intact, they’ll survive.

    1. I am old in my mid-70s and taking care of my old vehicles I think will last me long enough. My wife has a real clean, neat Toyota 4-Runner that I ordered out without running boards or roof rack but with wider tires in 2000. I used it shooting quail and pheasant in North Texas and Oklahoma and my everyday driver until I bought my 2008 F-150. We traded her little RAV4 for the pickup and now she has just over 100K miles on her 4-Runner and I have about 110K on my truck. We spend about $1K every 50,000 miles on tune ups and replacing all the stuff that needs it and I keep good tires on the ground, that and regular oil changes should keep us in good shape for the next ten years. Both are full frame vehicles mostly made of real metal.

  4. Take yer styling pick:
    1. jelly bean
    2. jelly bean beaten with the flat back of a shovel then chopped and slashed with an ax.
    Thanks to gummint’s *spit*CAFE*spit* standards, car manufacturers have to give us what compressible flow laws dictate for low drag shape.

    1. If this thing is intended to also be sold in the EU, it has to meet their “gentle impact” pedestrian standards. Thus the jelly bean shaped front end. Which I suspect has no actual research to back up. Just watch some Russian crash videos and see all the peds bounced around, get up and walk away.

  5. One of my current vehicles is a 2004 Pontiac GTO.

    It carries on the old GTO tradition and style just the same as if I put on a nametag that said “Dean Martin” and then claimed to be Dean Martin.

    (It’s a kicka** car, but it’s not a real GTO.)

    1. Kind of like the 4-door “Chargers”.

      I’m a fan of the original Grand Wagoneers (less so of the AMC mechanicals). At least the new ones are supposed to be on Dodge (er, Ram) truck frames and not fiat/alfa unibodies. But they will be priced way out of our range. Hopefully they won’t be fiat ugly.

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