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Hybrid Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Rubicon 4XE. Photos by Jack Gilbert.

If you haven’t checked out the lineup of Jeeps recently, you should. Not that you’re necessarily going to pull out your checkbook, but you might find it intriguing that the array of new Jeep vehicles is pretty complete, from super-luxury, to mild luxury, to more compact luxury, and then on down to more basic hustle to the grocery store types, and then to the good ol’ familiar Wrangler.

At that, this isn’t your grand-dad’s Wrangler anymore. You can even get it in all its rock-climbing glory with an electric plug-in hybrid powertrain.

The Jeep line has made big news for 2022 at the high-end of the price and capability range, starting at the top with a luxurious return of the Grand Wagoneer, which I reviewed a couple of months ago as the elongated Grand Wagoneer L. I pointed out that it was an Escalade-Navigator-Suburban-Expetirion fighter, and I declared that its opulent interior might be the richest and most well-appointed in the industry now.

The heavy promotion for the Grand Wagoneer L sort of obscured some very neat vehicles farther down the pay scale, in fact throughout the rest of the pay range. We can capture the essence of some of them here.

Since the Wagoneer disappeared from showrooms, Jeep has marshaled its headlining stuff in the Cherokee, a midsize but solid family hauler that can tow boats and do light off-roading in its own right.

But going back up to the bigger Wagoneer category, Jeep has built a Grand Wagoneer without the L – with the same general design and equipment, but short of the L’s all-out luxury that boosts it up, up and away over the $100,000 mark.

The “bargain” Grand Wagoneer I tested was just as big and roomy, and it had very nice instrumentation without the real wood and other fancy materials. It still had three rows of seats.

It also had considerable performance, with a 6.4-liter Hemi V8 supplying power to all four wheels through a 10-speed automatic. Mine was black, with blacked out grille and trim, and looked quite racy, with its black alloy wheels, too, and its neutral grey interior with black trim.

Grand Wagoneer comes in a lower-priced moderately priced version along with the opulent “L.”

Interesting to build an all-out luxury vehicle, and then serve up a more modest, moderate version of it for us commoners, I’d say.

I still remain partial to the midsized Grand Cherokee, however, even though the Grand Wagoneers handle with surprising agility and maneuverability. Especially the Grand Cherokee I got for another test drive. It was the Grand Cherokee Summit Reserve, which came loaded to the skies with most of the fancy features of that top of the heap Grand Wagoneer L.

This Grand Cherokee Summit Reserve has a stylish flair on the outside, with a formal trim line running around the roofline and down to the body proper, and the distinctive Grand Cherokee grille stands out from the more subdued redesign of the Grand Wagoneer grille.

But climb inside and be prepared to have your senses put on high alert, starting with Palermo leather seats and door trim that is part of the $4,000 Summit Reserve package. That grouping also includes a 19-speaker McIntosh high performance audio with a 950-watt amplifier that could, with a little prompting, blow your brains out – or at least your eardrums.

Under the hood, the Grand Cherokee Summit Reserve “only” has a 5.7-liter Hemi, a familiar tool for hot-rodders. This one has 357 horsepower and 390 foot-pounds of torque, and all of that is standard at the basic price of $59,365 for the two-row vehicle.

But just try to stay disciplined and avoid those options that add another $14,000. My favorite feature is the rear video screens on the back side of the front buckets, which cost about $2,000 more and give you Amazon Fire TV for Auto so rear occupants and kids can watch all sorts of things, including YouTube, which could prevent long-trip boredom alone by providing movies and concert videos.

But just in case you think Jeep had completely veered away from what made it incredibly popular with off-roaders everywhere in the world, we drove the new 2022 Wrangler Unlimited Rubicon. Maybe Jeep executives saw the new challenge coming from Ford, with its new Bronco that is a first-year sellout that already has closed out sales for 2022 – you can order a new one, hope to see it by July, but it’ll be a 2023 – but Jeep bolstered its lifeblood Wrangler.

This one came right while we were getting hit with a heavy week of snow on the North Shore of Lake Superior outside Duluth, so we admittedly spent quite a bit of time auto-starting it and letting it warm up to contend with below-zero temperatures.

The base version of this Wrangler Unlimited Rubicon cost $55,225, but loaded as it was the tally reached $69,545.

It was painted Hydro Blue Pearl-Coat, which stood out in any crowd, especially with the bright white snow and the dazzling blue of Lake Superior. It stood out technically, too, with Chrysler’s impressive dual-ovehead-cam 2.0-liter four-cylinder, turbocharged, and hooked up to a plug-in hybrid system, and an 8-speed automatic transmission.

The battery-pack operated electric motor can run the vehicle on its own for short hops, and while it recharges with braking, it can be fully recharged by plugging it in, helping bolster fuel economy and outright power.

Our only reason for dismay, in fact, was that we only got about 17 or 18 miles per gallon tops, off an EPA estimate of l49 mpg city and 20 highway. Hybrids and electric vehicles generally get better mileage in city driving, but that’s where we did most of our driving. I attribute the dramatic drop-off to the time we spent auto starting and then warming up our bodies, more than the Jeep.

Still, after the tremendously impressive array of all things Jeep, from top to bottom, I must say the most comments I got from all of them was for the little Wrangler Unlimited Rubicon. My son, Jack, took some remarkable photos of it and when I put a couple of them up on Facebook, the reaction was both immediate and positive. It may take a while for those impressive Grand Cherokee and Grand Wagoneer models to catch up.

Grand Cherokee Summit