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Brand: Jeep
Product: Wrangler EcoDiesel
Release Date: December 2019
Base Price: $39,040
From: jeep.com
Off-road courses on media drives for journalists tend to be stage-managed affairs. There’s a bit of dirt and a couple of strategically-placed rocks designed to show off some nifty new feature, like a new forward-facing camera or hill descent control. There’s often someone in a company polo holding your hand from the passenger seat, too.
For the launch of the new diesel-powered Wrangler, however, Jeep took a different approach. I hopped in a Wrangler Rubicon EcoDiesel; someone told me to listen to the spotters and follow the Jeep in front; and with that, I embarked on an hour-long, rock-laden course through the red sands of Utah’s Sand Hollow State Park. Multiple colleagues described it as “probably the toughest drive I’ve ever done on one of these things.” I’m far from a seasoned off-roader, but that didn’t matter. The Jeep Wrangler is truly, as we put it in our first drive review, “a weapon for tackling the earth.”
And this Wrangler, the new 2020 EcoDiesel Rubicon, is the most potent weapon Jeep has ever put forward. It has a stupid amount of low-end torque — 442 lb-ft, to be precise — and you get it full bore at just 1,400 rpm. Even with a suburban-dwelling doofus like me at the wheel, it’s a relentless, rock-crawling animal.
I followed the instructions — disconnect the sway bar, lock the differentials, keep my up momentum in the sand — and clambered up and down grades and over boulders that would have broken an off-road trimmed crossover. The marvel was not what the Wrangler could do (that’s a given), but how effortless it felt with all that torque. The EcoDiesel Wrangler did not break a sweat during an hour of being put through its paces — and thanks to its capabilities, neither did I.
