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Volvo: Safety Beyond the Star RatingsHands on with the 2024 Grand Cherokee L Summit Reserve
We test the $72,000 Jeep Grand Cherokee L Summit everywhere that one might take it and end up shocked by just how capable it is.
The Up Market Jeep
$72,000 is a lot of money. Spending it on a Jeep with aspirations of rivaling mainstream luxury brands might sound like a questionable choice. Jeep has always had a reputation for rugged off-road prowess, durability, and selling its vehicles at a fairly inexpensive price point.
The Grand Cherokee L is meant to aim up market and still feel like a serious value. Can it actually accomplish such a grand feat? To find out, we tested all three rows on road and off-road in colorful Colorado.
A Driver’s Jeep
The idea of a driver’s Jeep is somewhat laughable. Despite the brand’s popularity, most objective people would agree that they don’t exactly inspire passion with their on-road performance. That’s why it was so surprising to feel how tight and responsive the Grand Cherokee is on pavement.
Don’t get us wrong. The folks at BMW’s M Division or Mercedes-Benz’s AMG factory don’t have anything to worry about but to be blunt about it, the Grand Cherokee drives better than any other Jeep we’ve tested.
The steering is predictable and makes this large beast easy to place in a lane and around a corner. The suspension helps it to remain flat too which means that putting power down through a turn isn’t only achievable by dare devils.
The accelerator provides easy-to-manage linear power delivery and Jeep’s notorious ‘death wobble’ issue is truly gone in the Grand Cherokee. If there’s anything to complain about it’s a sometimes touchy brake pedal which feels a lot less linear than it could be.
Not Lacking Off-Road
It is possible though that all of the attention that Jeep put toward making the Grand Cherokee good on road has somehow neutered its ability when the road runs out? In our testing on the back roads and dirt trails of Colorado Springs that simply wasn’t the case. Despite deep ruts caused by water runoff and completely unmaintained roads the Grand Cherokee had no issue.
That’s in part due to the off-road mode that provides 11 inches of ground clearance. Of course, it only works at lower speeds but that’s sort of the whole point. Jeep’s Quadra-Trac II 4WD system includes a two-speed transfer case and automatic high-range 4WD. This particular SUV also includes electronically locking differentials.
Luxury You Can Feel, Hear, and See
Finally, Jeep isn’t, at least until very recently, known as a luxury brand. Nevertheless, the Grand Cherokee L Summit offers some of the fanciest features we’ve seen at this price point. The front seats offer a dizzying array of adjustments including those for side bolster tension, lumbar support, and thigh support. They also happen to have a massaging feature.
From those posh diamond-stitched leather seats, the driver and front passenger each have their own screen positioned just ahead. Of course, for the driver, that’s the gauge cluster but the passenger gets their own screen with media, navigation, and other features. The dash itself includes real wood trim and a satisfying mix of physical and touch-sensitive controls.
The infotainment system that sits between the front seats is easy to use, intuitive, and typically quite fast. The only complaint we have about the Grand Cherokee’s interior is the extensive use of cheap piano black plastic. It gathers finger prints faster than a detective’s office and immediately detracts from the overall theme and aesthetic.
Plenty of Passenger Amenities
There’s more to love behind the front row though. The second-row seats aren’t as adjustable but they’re still very supportive and comfortable. Jeep includes a center console storage area with multi-level storage too. Middle-row passengers in the Grand Cherokee L Summit also benefit from the quad-zone climate control in this SUV. That means that each one gets to set their own temperature and that theme of equal luxury for all continues in the third row.
Back there, the two seats, offer exceptional headroom and legroom. For reference, I’m six-foot-six and I fit with room to spare in both categories. That was shocking. On top of that, the third-row passengers each get their own climate control vent and a pair of USB power points too.
Finally, the center console that sits between the second-row passengers also flips forward to allow access for the third row passengers without requiring any assistance from those in the middle seats. That’s clever.
A Unique Combination
The Jeep Grand Cherokee didn’t make our list of the best three-row SUVs of 2023 due to one main factor; price. In fact, it even lost to the Ford Explorer based on pricing and on-road performance. While the base GC starts in the middle of the pricing bracket we used for those competitions, the Summit trim we tested costs north of $70,000. That’s serious money but we’d be remiss not to highlight that it’s the sum of its parts that makes the Grand Cherokee L so special.
Not a single one of the SUVs in our above-mentioned competition can keep up off-road. None can match the luxury offered by the Grand Cherokee. Finally, in that group of ten vehicles, only one, the Mazda CX-9 offers a better driving experience. Now, consider what else one can buy for this kind of cash.
The Land Rover Defender aims at offering a similar combination of features and rugged off-road capability but still falls short in the luxury department. Other high-end luxury SUVs are better to drive and can even match the Jeep’s posh interior but they’ll end up stuck on a trail that the Grand Cherokee doesn’t even sweat. In fact, on one trail we had to stop and wait as a BMW X5 turned around because the driver decided the terrain was too sketchy.
All of this is to say that this is an SUV that offers something very few other brands come close to. Is it worthy of its price tag? That’s up to you to decide but if I were an off-road enthusiast with a bunch of friends or a large family that I regularly wanted to adventure with, I’d say yes.
