Should you consider buying a Jeep in 2020 or 2021?
Dud brands have a way of pulling you in, grabbing your attention and not letting go. Don’t be the lab rat in their mad car ownership risk experiment.
Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Land Rover, Volvo, Jaguar, Ford, Nissan - how many owners do they need to betray before some people wise up?
It typically starts innocently enough, often with people simply doing their due diligence (I mean, it’s better they come and ask me than just dropping five or six figures without thinking it through, I guess).
Here’s how the well-meaning among you contact me regarding these haphazard brands:
In the words of Mr. T: I pity the fool…
One more thing, are Jeep's reliability issues a thing of the past? Would a Jeep grand cherokee v6 diesel in the overland trim level be a worth while purchase? Or am I still looking at the wrong options.
- Patrick
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Yeah, Patrick. Still wrong.
Patrick here originally wanted a five-year-old Porsche Cayenne - the ‘should’ve gone to SpecSavers Volkswagen Touareg’ to tow a 3.5-tonne horse float. Pregnant wife, etc. (He wasn’t towing his pregnant wife. He has a pregnant wife. Big difference, but still: Very stressful.)
If you can’t afford a new Cayenne, you generally can’t afford to keep an old one going. And, towing 3.5 tonnes - do-able, but bad idea. Plus: attempting to keep a pregnant woman happy: very ambitious. #respect.
On this last point (the quest for ‘in-oven bun’ gestational contentment). I subscribe to social philosopher Elvis Presley’s advice on that (quote): “To bear with unbearable sorrow, to run where the brave dare not go, to try when your arms are too weary, to fight the unbeatable foe, to dream the impossible dream, blah, blah, blah. It’s that. Therefore: Don’t try. That’s the underlying message, clearly.
I think that was actually Andy Williams who said that. Anyway, Patrick has obviously seen Jeep’s recent marketing, which essentially says: ‘we were arseholes previously, but it’s all good now. We’re awesome.’
TIDAL CHANGE?
Jeep Australia says it’s redressing its former customer crap-ness, which was inspired by Idi Amin, by increasing warranty, adding capped price servicing and lifetime roadside assist, reducing parts costs, increasing tech support, and moving customer care onshore (instead of - I dunno - the Phillipines. Wherever.)
Problem is: None of these things affects reliability. Poor reliability stems from under-done R&D. It’s like, bad design plus crap implementation equals poor reliability. Longer warranty doesn’t change that.
But reliability is only half of the customer satisfaction equation. Being dealt with fairly and expeditiously when you have a problem is the other half. No evidence yet that I’ve seen - on moving the needle there, away from ‘Idi Amin’ and towards ‘Nelson Mandella’ on that.
Cultural change is very hard. Especially when you’ve got one organisation importing the product and separate businesses selling it, and they’re currently not profitable. Selling Jeeps cannot be profitable at the moment.
So, no. My standard advice to would-be Jeep Buyers is: If you are truly committed to being a lab rat in this experiment, contact your friendly neighbourhood psychiatrist. Talk is cheap. Let us, at the very least, wait for some evidence before dropping the big bucks on an enduring bad idea.
(TWO-)FACE THE FACTS
When you’re out there asking people their opinion, brands like Jeep, Land Rover, Volkswagen, Three-pronged-suppository - whatever - they either shine, or they’re Satan in a suit, depending on who you ask. The needle moves all over the spectrum. Very confusing.
JEEP GRAND CHEROKEE LIMITED
Just wanted some advice on this vehicle. A lot of people say not to buy and others say it’s a good car. I have heard Jeep has a bad reputation of reliability and service but I would just like to hear your thoughts on his please. Thank you,
- Linda
Reasonable question there, from Linda. Bottom-line answer: Jeep is still a bad idea in my view.
Let’s say you’re out there, researching a new car, asking people you know about their experiences. Everyone you ask seems to be representing their honestly held view, and yet these are often deeply polarised and seemingly irreconcilable with other people’s accounts. Mutually exclusive.
Jeep cannot be both stellar and also Satan in a Suit. And yet, owners you ask will vote either way. It’s very confusing for the would-be owner, like Linda. I get dozens of e-mails reflecting this confusion.
Most people considering these dud brands, they kinda know (or they strongly suspect) that it’s a bad idea. But they are also emotionally enamoured. The gravitational pull of a brand can be quite strong.
And yet, the stories of under-done engineering and malevolent customer support are too prolific and credible to ignore completely. But these act on a different part of the brain. The attraction goes straight to the id, whereas the part that screams ‘bad idea’ hits you in the intellect. So you end up quite conflicted.
You can want something that’s a very bad idea. We do that all the time. Like, the boss’s secretary, Tiffany … she’s always a bad idea. But she’s hot, and reluctant to take ‘no’ for an answer, seemingly… This is exactly that. Reward versus risk. We all want that dopamine hit.
It’s a conflicted state, and because you know what you want, confirmation bias is so insidious: so perhaps you look for, and find, that dude who thrashed his Grand Cherokee for 300,000 kilometres and it was bulletproof. Despite never being serviced and all attempts to break it.
There’s your evidence. Justification. Whatever. If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail - that’s confirmation bias.
The real problem here is metadata, and bad conclusions. Almost everyone takes their own personal experience of one vehicle, and they extrapolate it up to the brand. That’s the problem.
Three-hundred-thousand-kay Jeep dude goes: ‘My Jeep was awesome, therefore Jeeps are awesome.’ Dude whose Jeep continually went poopy in its trousers, was off the road for six months and slapped him with a $20,000 repair bill, goes:
“Jeeps are shit mate.”
The balanced view is: Don’t take a metadata sample of one experience and extrapolate it up. If you do it’s indefensible and unhelpful, and yet everyone does it with cars.
Even with the bad brands, most owners have good experiences. Note that I did not just say owning a Jeep is a good idea. It’s not, in my view.
Dream a Jeep - it’s better
Let’s say they sell 10,000 cars a year on average, for 10 years. That’s 100,000 cars. And let’s say just two per cent of them present with a serious problem - 98 per cent is a pass with honours in most exams - but not here.
98,000 somewhat happy customers; 2000 unhappy customers. That doesn’t sound too bad, proportionally. Let’s say they turn half of those frowns upside-down, by fixing the problem efficiently in a low- or no-cost way. 99,000 happy customers.
But let’s say the balance of 1000 customers gets properly bent over. That’s the problem.
Unhappy customers - even of the dog brands - are a proportionally small group. Their experiences are unrepresentative of the median ownership experience. And this means the dog or otherwise status of a brand is defined not by the average experience, but by the worst experiences. It’s an undemocratic process, not a majority verdict.
Whether you should buy a Jeep; I guess that depends upon the strength/depravity of your attraction, and your capacity to tolerate risk. Tiffany is hot, but if you get caught, you might lose the kids and the house. It’s a choice, either way.
Maybe you really love that vehicle, and what you know it says to others about you. Pro tip: Nobody actually gives a shit - status is (let’s be kind) epistemically subjective.
If the failure rate is just one per cent, the risk seems pretty low. (I’m talking ‘customer experience’ failure. Not mechanical failure.) Ninety-nine happy campers for every disaster. Why not just roll the dice? The odds are way better than Russian Roulette. Overwhelmingly in your favour.
Workplace safety is exactly like this. So is driving. Risks are much lower than one per cent in these contexts. But consequences are pretty high.
Thought a Jeep (was a good idea)
Here’s a thought experiment on one per cent risk, and how it might affect you. For perspective. Thought experiment. Totally hypothetical. Do not attempt this at home.
Say you go to a five-star hotel for a small function. One hundred people just like you, all jammed into a ballroom.
The MC steps up and says: “Welcome. Just for kicks tonight we’ve put a hand grenade under one of your seats. Not to worry though - it’s only a very small hand grenade, carefully designed to kill just the person sitting directly atop.
“When I click this button in 10 seconds, we’ll see who the unlucky loser is, and then everyone left will each receive an envelope with $100,000 in it.”
For you there is only a once per cent chance of being hamburger boy, and a 99 per cent chance of ending the night $100,000 richer. But do you suppose there would be a spontaneous, violent exodus from the room? I think there probably would. I think I’d leave. Low risk; high stakes. Buying a risky, dud brand is exactly this. Different setting. Different cast. Same story.
Word to the wise
It is of course entirely up to you what brand of vehicle you buy, and how you justify the purchase. And if you end up in the majority, awesome.
The reward (like ‘Tiffany’) is a powerful motivator, with - easily - the capacity to eclipse the risk. But I strongly suggest at least considering the risk, no matter how strong the attraction. Because I’ve dealt with hundreds of disgruntled car buyers from these worst brands.
I’ve seen how the betrayal hits people. I’ve seen the effect of the betrayal upon them, at a deep, emotional level. And it strikes me that most of these people who wrote to me at their wits end, requesting a silver bullet to kill the werewolf, were once just as infatuated with a brand as, perhaps, you are, right now.
If you have lots of kids, including twins or even triplets on the way, the Kia Carnival is the best possible family vehicle for you. It’s a smart, luxurious and highly practical workhorse that also offers excellent value.