my wife’s business demands that she go out and complete her assignments pretty much regardless of weather or road conditions…this has resulted in many a white knuckled ride through unplowed mountain roads.
for the past 6 years this task has fallen to a 2004 jeep liberty which has done pretty well in most situations but i have a feeling it is reaching the end of the line and am considering moving onto something new.
from what i’ve researched it seems as though there aren’t a whole lot of options in the less-than-full-size market that include actual 4 wheel drive capability and some reasonable ground clearance (~8" or more). there are plenty of AWD options available but i am hesitant to go that direction knowing some of the rutty, washed out, logging roads we have driven down over the years.
i feel like my options are as follows…
another jeep liberty…but probably not…
toyota fj cruiser…
nissan xterra…
jeep grand cherokee…
used H3 (alpha)?
i will probably be the one driving it most of the time but since my wife will need to use it as well it must be automatic and it has to stay somewhere around 180" long…once it gets bigger than that i think she is going to struggle to know where the corners are.
personally i like the FJ but the lack of full rear doors has the wife concerned about passengers and eventual baby seats.
so does anyone own any of these and have some advice?
Had rear 1/2 doors on a Ranger and hated them. Worst part was trying to load stuff from a shopping cart in a parking lot. If you park next to someone with the front door and half door open you created a little fenced in area that you can’t get the cart into. I can only. Imagine how much I would have hated this once I was loading a baby seat, but the Ranger was gone before that. So I’d cross the FJ off the list.
We love our Murano but I can’t picture it doing well on rutted unpaved roads. AWD and good tires it tears through paved road snow though, and being FWD based you don’t have to worry about the wife fish tailing around when it’s not turning all 4.
I have taken my edge from high speed on pavement to muddy construction roads. Never once had an issue with getting stuck or being nervous that it could not handle what I was throwing at it. Also a super comfy ride with all the bells and whistles.
well after some looking around the wife put the kibosh on the fj cruiser and xterra as being either too weird looking or too plain and not enough features…so we have ended up with a grand cherokee
I though about that too same with the touareg and BMW X5 but I always feel like it could get expensive really quick when I am off roading with my touareg. I would feel much better bombing around the country side with a jeep of a tahoe or something you can fix at any local parts store
yeah i wasn’t looking to have a $50k+ vehicle. part of it too is that this SUV has to show up at people’s houses for appointments and sometimes people get a little weird if you pull up in what is perceived to be an expensive vehicle or make. the less fortunate see it as showing off and wonder why they have to pay you so much to do what may appear to be a simple job and the well to do wonder why you have the same car that they have for doing what may appear to be a simple job
When asked if I could buy a mercedes suv, my boss replied that he didn’t care. I asked if the company cared and he said they may but in his opinion it just tells the customer that you are good at what you do. The conversation was much longer than that, but that summarizes it pretty well.
well it is our own business so there isn’t any concern about what the boss thinks… but when you are going to someone’s home and walking around and ultimately determining the worth of that home people can be hyper sensitive about their property and possessions. This can get worse if they think you have a chip on your shoulder. In the same respect you shouldn’t show up in a rusted out clunker.
when I was working on university design projects the unwritten rule was to never get too nice of a rental in case you ended up having to drive the client around. For several visits in a row I had some kind of Cadillac or Infiniti and the university PM always made me drive to lunch because he said he’d like to get to enjoy the nice car he was renting…