Rather more gratifyingly, this time it’s a twin-turbocharged 3.0-litre petrol V6, which, even though it has been sanitised from 400bhp in Australia to 288bhp here so that it meets our emissions rules, is much more like it.
Particularly as it makes 362lb ft of torque from an accessible 2300rpm. And while a 0-62mph dash of 7.9sec would give a rabbit plenty of time to steal some veg and mooch back through the hole through which it came, I’m not sure I would want my 2454kg of pick-up truck to go much faster.
Jeep Wrangler: introduction
At nearly £60,000, the Ranger Raptor doesn’t have many direct rivals, but when it comes to off-the-shelf 4×4 ability, there’s still nothing like the Jeep Wrangler, which happily also starts at £60,000 these days. Goodness, when did that happen?
It doesn’t do the same thing as the Ford, but it does do amazingly good things, particularly at lower speeds, and Jeep has looked after this model fantastically well over the decades.
It’s every inch as well-defined and honed a product as, say, the Porsche 911, deftly evolved with great continuity and so successful that in a good year, Jeep will sell a quarter of a million of them.
It’s possible to argue – and in a former job, I once did – that it’s the single greatest vehicle model line of all time. Yes, the Ford Model T was the first that could be built in huge numbers and the Mini’s transverse engine layout was jolly innovative, but they weren’t driven off the back of a glider on D-Day, were they?
