I bought a 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee EcoDiesel in the summer of 2017. Drove it for a total of 3 years, approximately 40K miles, and just sold it last month. What follows is a review that I wrote after the first year and updated after having forgotten about it before I posted it, because this is going to end up being several posts, about getting and then getting rid of this, and what I replaced it with and what I think of that.
After my divorce, I found myself with 2 vehicles that were not particularly practical for day to day kid taxi and definitely not for long trips with lots of stuff, i.e. they both had back seats, but not something I'd expect the kids to use for multiple hours, and neither was exactly practical for taking lots of stuff on a trip, so I realized that I was going to have to find some sort of crossover/SUV type thing. I probably could have made due about 90% of the time with a wagon or a cute-ute, but I figured if I was getting one, especially since I was getting ready to take the trip within a month or so, I'd want something that was capable of carrying kids, bikes, and all the stuff I normally drag with me to the beach, and my original plan had been to sell the pickup, thus wanting something that could tow a trailer to carry the stuff I'd otherwise have stuck in the bed of the truck. Hybrid SUV/crossovers were a little limited, and those available were either tiny or didn't really gain much in terms of fuel economy, so I concluded I wanted a diesel, and my budget meant used, so I was basically cross-shopping the Jeep Grand Cherokee and the BMW X5d. After a string of fairly unreliable used German cars, anecdotal evidence from others, and being of the general opinion that BMW only designs cars to survive the lease period, I decided that I would try my luck with the Jeep to gain better reliability. I aimed for the 2015 because I'd heard horror stories of first-year teething issues, but generally the reviews were much better for the '15s.
I bought the Summit, specifically because I wanted the Adaptive Cruise Control, Collision Warning, etc. It’s possible to get those on lower trim packages, but fairly uncommon. Found one with about 34,000 miles on it in Arkansas, I'm suspecting a former Wal-Mart exec vehicle or someone who did traveling sales in the general vicinity due to the high miles for its age.
Likes:
The seats are comfortable, and the creature comforts are good. I can sit behind myself without feeling too cramped - a feat that was not possible in previous generations of the GC (late 90s/early 2000s), there are plenty of USB and 12V power outlets, seat heaters and steering wheel heater, etc. and a seat cooler, which is impressively useful.
This trim level gets the up level Harmon/Kardon sound system, which has a great sound, including passing the “vibrate the rearview mirror” test (First track on Outkast’s Speakerboxx) that I have been using for every car sound system since the album came out, probably better than any other vehicle I’ve owned. I like the HD radio a lot too.
The fuel economy is nothing short of amazing for a vehicle of this size and capability. My baselines are my 97 Tacoma 5-spd V6 (part-time 4WD), and my 07 911 Turbo (AWD). Both car and truck got about the same ~18 mpg on my former commute before I transitioned to full-time WFH (27 miles one way, mix of secondary and 55mph speed limit highway). The truck hasn’t been on too many highway trips, but the best it ever gets is low 20s. The 911 can get up into the 26-27 range on the highway if I’m behaving myself, and its main benefit is that the slippery shape and tall gearing means that fuel economy doesn’t fall off as rapidly toward the top end of prudent highway speed.
The Jeep averages 24mpg on my commute, and as long as the highway speed limit is 65mph or less, it’ll break 30mpg. When speeds start getting into the 75+ range because of 70mph speed limits, it’ll be more like 27-28 too. But this is a vehicle that will hold 5 people and a whole bunch of stuff, and is capable of towing more than 7000 lbs.
Couple that economy with a 23+ gallon tank, and the vehicle has a considerably larger range than its passengers do on long trips. I on more than one occasion got in the thing, drove 600+ miles on one tank, including a stint of 6 hours nonstop once and a personal best of 642 miles on a single tank with an indicated 65 miles of remaining range.
The powertrain is excellent, I rarely feel like it’s too slow even when I need to accelerate briskly, and it only noticeably sounds/feels like a diesel at startup (brief delay after pressing the start button on cold mornings while the glow plugs fire), when you’re outside of the vehicle or driving with the windows down, especially just off of idle and you get a little bit of “canal boat” clatter. I do wish that it had an auto stop/start, but I understand that comes in later model years.
The transmission is smooth, but busy given the 8 speeds. It is possible to confuse it at speeds just off of idle, because it likes to start in 2nd gear unless you have come to a full stop for a few seconds, and if you’re on an incline or something, the combination of the eco mode dampening throttle response, minor turbo lag, and the transmission being up a gear means that you might respond by dipping into the throttle too aggressively and trigger a downshift to first. It also resolutely refuses to actually take the engine to indicated redline, even in manual mode. Not that this necessarily matters in a diesel anyway, but it always feels like it’s short-shifting below the already diesel-typical 4500rpm redline under hard acceleration.
Snow traction is good - I drove back from Pittsburgh through the PA and WV mountains on 79, US-19, and I-77 in ~4-5” of snow, though I do note that the dedicated snow mode on the transmission resets every time you shut off the engine, meaning that you have to re-select it. Cold weather performance is also good - it’s a little sluggish on cold start when the weather is in the teens or below, and sounds a lot more like a diesel until it warms up, but it always fires right up. I did use an anti-gelling additive pretty religiously when the weather was in the single digits, which I’m sure helps, and having remote start in that kind of weather is also great.
The safety tech and ancillary automatic features are borderline amazing in terms of how well they actually work. The adaptive cruise control works extremely well in both heavy and light traffic, and I’m a convert. I will never buy another vehicle without it, and I have been telling other people the same thing - it is absolutely worth getting it if the option is available. I used it daily in both highway and city driving, in all sorts of conditions. It recognizes motorcycles, trailers, etc, and is very good at maintaining exactly the distance I’ve set, which is adjustable, and the combination of sensors it uses doesn’t set off the radar detector (when traveling outside of VA, of course). It's even smart enough to hold off on accelerating if it My only complaints are that it is not as smooth as a human driver, because it doesn’t “see” as far, so it will continue accelerating and then stab the brakes to match traffic speed in cases where I would have seen that there was traffic ahead and just coasted or gently braked. It also sometimes (not always) accelerates away from a stop much more slowly than I would and I have to override it to get the turbo spun up. Lastly, while it will bring the vehicle to a full stop and resume moving again if traffic is creeping along, it has a timer that cancels the cruise control after just 2 seconds of sitting stopped behind another vehicle. This is too aggressive and should be adjustable, because the amount of times I have to manually resume from a stop would drop significantly if I could set that timeout to 4 or 5 seconds.
The blind spot warning is a lot more unobtrusive than a lot of the ones I’ve seen, in that while it throws up the blind spot warning in the mirror, the audio alerts mostly leave you alone unless you have your turn signal on and it detects something directly in your blind spot. I guess if you don’t routinely use turn signals this might limit its effectiveness somewhat, but this is not a problem for me, and it’s less likely to be disabled because it doesn’t bleat at you every time you drift slightly over a line without your turn signal on. The only false positives I’ve gotten is when I am in a 2-lane turning lane, because it thinks that I’m going to be turning into the path of the cars in the adjacent turning lane, even though I’m not since the lane continues in parallel. The cross-traffic alert (warns you of a vehicle crossing your path if you’re backing out of a parking space) works very well - it often sees stuff before I do.
There is also an automated high beam system, and the best praise I can give is that the first few times I used it, every time I would be reaching for the stalk to turn my high beams on or off, it had already done it. It gets confused by lights at the roadside that look like headlights, but otherwise works quite well.
Meh:
Collision warning is a mixed bag. It has definitely saved my bacon once or twice, but it also is more prone to false alarms due to differences in closing speeds and in situations where you are going around a turning vehicle, and since it makes a loud beep and pulses the brakes, the false alarms are occasionally bothersome, especially when the adaptive cruise control is engaged and someone cuts you off, because the two systems are clearly not talking to one another - the adaptive cruise is slowing the vehicle down just fine, yet the collision warning is still screaming at you. But ultimately it's not bothersome enough to defeat the system.
There’s air suspension, which has several offroad settings to help the Jeep hike up its skirts when terrain requires it, and drops the front end by an inch or two when at highway speeds (Aero mode), plus a setting that drops the car down for ease of entry when parked. I have no doubt that the adjustable ride height improves the on-road performance without compromising off-road and heavily loaded performance. Minor complaints: Aero mode can’t be engaged manually like the other suspension settings can be. Putting the car in Sport mode enables Aero all the time, but it also disables Eco mode (makes the transmission upshift sooner and remaps the throttle response to a more conservative profile). There is a setting that has the car automatically drop to the park height when you put it in park, and then raise to drive height when you exceed 10mph, but I’ve discovered two problems with that feature that outweigh the benefit of making it easier for the kids to get in and out of the car - the reduced height of the rear hatch makes me bump my head on it when loading and unloading, and if you don’t park carefully, the car drops itself down onto parking barriers and curbs such that it’s possible to catch the bumper on those things and damage the under tray. If it raised immediately after you started the vehicle, it’d at least avoid the latter problem. Also, the higher than normal settings make the suspension really crashy over bumps and stuff, I think because it increases the pressure in the suspension and thus reduces the dampening effect of the shocks.
Dislikes:
The infotainment system is supposed to be basically state of the art, and as good as it sounds, I find it extremely frustrating. The Nav uses XM Travel Link to get traffic and other info to assist in routing, but I discovered when pitting it against the nav on my phone that it’s not nearly as smart about avoiding traffic as Google Maps. I’m guessing that it only avoids major backups, rather than Google’s typical which is to reroute you if it can save you more than 5 minutes. And generally, XM Travel link isn’t worth the subscription fee ($10/mo) once you get beyond the free period.
The phone integration is good (it can read me text messages, do canned responses, call audio quality is good), but it occasionally fails to automatically pair with my phone, and has completely lost its pairing (no paired phones in the list) at least once in the first few months that I owned it. It’s supposed to have a data connection that can act as a Wifi hotspot, but the pricing is such that I’ve never seriously considered it as an option ($9.99/Day, $19.99/Week, $49.99/Month for unlimited data). I also haven’t messed much with the app integration (Pandora, Spotify, etc) because it seems like this is kind of an afterthought. It also won't let me dictate a response to a text message without signing up for some additional services, so I end up using Google on the phone anyway.
I have two major complaints with this system. The first is the details of the user interface that make it clear that they just didn’t think through their execution quite long enough. For example - when playing any audio source, it has the usual displays on the main screen, including some of the RDS info (what song is playing, etc). But the secondary screen that you can call up on the center of the gauge cluster doesn’t carry any of that info - all it says is the frequency of what station you’re tuned to, or that you’re listening to Aux, SD card, USB, Bluetooth, etc. The secondary display is effectively useless because it doesn’t provide enough info to allow you to avoid having to look at the main display. Even on the main display, when it is playing something off of a user storage device, if the song name or artist name is longer than the number of characters it wants to display, it just truncates it, instead of scrolling. These are noticeable to me because previous vehicles had these details right, so FCA really has no excuse.
But that is a minor annoyance compared to the last issue - how it handles user files. For a number of years, I have had a big thumb drive full of MP3s that served as the primary music source. A large portion of my music collection was dumped on it, it stayed in the car all the time, and I just pressed shuffle and went about my business. But where most cars have no trouble with this, including my 2010 Microsoft based Ford, 20-30GB of MP3s (around 4000 files according to the system) totally confounds this fancy system. It doesn’t support UFS-formatted drives, meaning that the vast majority of drives are going to have to be reformatted to FAT32 before they are recognized by the system at all. But after that, it doesn’t seem to possess the memory or processing horsepower to manage the task of indexing and playing music. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t maintain a nonvolatile index of the files that it can access quickly at boot, nor does it keep track of what it has already played. It remembers what song it was playing when you shut it off, but when you start the car, there’s a significant delay before it actually resumes playing that song (with 25GB of music it’s taking 1-2 minutes), and another 30-60 seconds once the song starts before it actually has finished indexing everything such that you could even skip to the next song. Shuffle maintains no state about what it has already played. The Ford system built a shuffle order when you initially pressed it, and worked its way through that list until the end or you turned off shuffle or added new songs, where this one starts a new shuffle with the currently playing song as track 1 in the list, meaning that you hear some songs very frequently, others almost never unless you’re on a long trip with multiple hours where you don’t turn the car off. It is nearly impossible to select a specific artist/album/song to play, because the system is too slow to populate the list. 1-2 minutes to build the list after you press the button, and then if you go into a specific subdirectory and then navigate back to the full list, you’re waiting for it to build the list again. Voice control mostly works if you know exactly what you want to play, but getting back to shuffling all songs has the standard delay. I’ve tried more than one USB drive as well as switching to an SD card (it has a dedicated SD slot) in the hopes that this was due to the speed of my thumb drive, but nothing helps. It’s just a poor execution with insufficient testing.
The parking sensors are a little dumb, in that they alert me of an object in front of me despite the transmission being in reverse, and vice versa. A better execution would be to have the lights on the display tell you that it’s detecting an obstacle, but mute the beeps. Otherwise, you can’t always discern whether you need to pay attention to the beeping, which reduces its effectiveness as a warning system.
Reliability
Ok, so this seems like a pretty good trucklet, why'd you get rid of it? Well, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I'm not certain the BMW would have been the less reliable choice anymore. First, FCA got caught cheating on emissions, and I got a settlement payment and an extension of the entire diesel emissions system warranty for the price of a couple of software updates. Mostly a good thing. Generally, it was dead reliable for about the first 18 months I owned it.
But...at about the 2 year mark, it started randomly throwing check engine lights, and then clearing them right about the time I'd think to myself "you know, I probably need to get that looked at..." And finally, mid-summer it freaked out a lot worse, I got a "service electronic throttle control" message and it went into a limp mode, where you basically only get about 30% throttle at most. The dealer tried to blame the air filter that was recently changed, charged me a diagnostic fee, and sent me on my way, only to have the problem return. Total tally of trips through the dealer before they actually found and fixed the problem: 3, over the course of 1500 miles. That one, the one where they replaced the exhaust particulate filter sensor and a boost pressure/MAF sensor, and the one where they actually found the root cause, which was a split hose in the intercooler. Due to the combination of low parts availability, and the fact that my Jeep dealer had exactly 1 diesel mechanic, who was clearly a Cummins guy, this was the first stint where they had my Jeep for something approaching 30 days, including while I was supposed to be on vacation. I'll spare you the rant about the terrible Dodge Journey they gave me as a loaner.
After all of that, it kept throwing CELs periodically, and I'd take it in, and they'd blame the fuel filter, or dirty injectors. It calmed down a little bit when I swapped the fuel filter and ran 2 tanks of fuel injector cleaner through it, but earlier this year it was starting to do it again fairly regularly.
Then, on Fathers' Day this year, it was hard to start. I thought maybe the nearly 5 year old battery had just died, and so I threw it on the charger for a bit and tried again later. Eventually got it started after rather a lot of cranking, and took it on a test drive to get the battery charged. Noticed a lot of white smoke, decided I should turn around, and before I could get it all the way home, it was overheating. Had to have it towed to the dealer on suspicion of a blown head gasket, and they diagnosed it as a cracked EGR cooler that was sucking coolant into the intake. This was apparently on some major back order such that they had the thing for a month after initially telling me they might not get the parts until September (!!). They test drive it after repair, it throws a code that requires replacement of a glow plug, another couple of days delay. Then I get it back, I have it for less than 24 hours, and it throws a "service DEF system" alert and another CEL. They did get it repaired in time for me to take it to the beach, and it behaves itself for a change, but there was definitely some stress about whether that would be true or not.
My original plan had been to keep it until the end of the extended warranty (another 2 years/30K miles) and then probably sell it, with the assumption that I'd have a number of good hybrid or electric options available to replace it with. But after realizing that I no longer trusted it not to strand me somewhere while on a trip or have some failure that Jeep either couldn't diagnose right the first try, or couldn't find parts to repair in a timely manner meaning I'd lose use of it for multiple weeks, it simply wasn't worth it anymore. If this hadn't been outside the statute of limitations for VA's Lemon Law, I would have had a good case for them to buy it back from me, as it met all of the other criteria. And then right around the time when I'm starting to seriously wonder whether I should replace it, FCA announces another recall that could result in a no-start condition, and that was sort of the final nail in the coffin for it. To the point that I actually dubbed it the "NecroDiesel".
I think the reality is that the added complexity necessary to make a small diesel clean and efficient simply makes it unreliable and difficult to troubleshoot, so since I was coming up on 75K miles, I figured it'd be better to get out from under it while it still held some value. I bought it for about $35K, got a $2500 settlement from FCA for being bad at diesel, sold it to Carmax 3 years and 40K miles later for $20K, so not a bad depreciation, all told.
I ended up keeping the pickup, so I never did use the tow hitch for anything more than a bike rack, and while the Grand Cherokee itself is a pretty good vehicle, I'd never recommend the diesel they're using in these to anyone.
