Having owned several Chrysler and Fiat cars, Chrysler has always been pretty shit. They’ve had to be rescued from bankruptcy a couple times, and have a history of badly-performing mergers and buyouts (DaimlerChrysler, Diamond Star Motors, Cerberus, FCA, etc). Jeep people will defend Jeep, but that’s it.
Jeep people will defend the Wrangler, but most of the rest of their lineup is competing with Nissan to see who can get the most sub-prime borrowers to buy one and it's brutal too because they're so unreliable that they'll cost these people way more to own than if they'd bought a better brand to begin with.
To be fair, Jeep was never really the most reliable American brand. Neither was Chrysler. But certainly since the ownership of Fiat, the reliability has definitely gone down. Stayed the same at the least.
I think Jeep and Chryslers biggest strength in their earlier years was even though they weren't incredibly reliable, they were easy to work on and parts were always available on part store shelves. Now they are the exact opposite, especially with modern car designers being obsessed with cramming a tiny engine into an even tinier engine bay, with less than an inch of room around the entire thing for tools.
Designing your car so that the only way to work on the engine is to remove it is extremely anti-consumer, anti-repair, and exactly what I would expect from Stellantis. Even their dealer tech info is garbage.
The 4.0 inline 6 was bulletproof.
I had a 1986 cj7 4.2 literally blow a hole in itself and dump all of its oil to the ground and keep on trucking.
Drove it to the next exit, parked it for the night at a hotel, and it even cranked up the next morning to get lined up for the tow truck.
Three grand later I had a brand new engine in it.
When you have enough slop in the bearings, it won't seize up immediately.
Lucas oil is also a miracle worker for older engines
Damn yea I recently got hit in my ten year old jeep cherokee and the estimator was shocked it had a metal rear plate since they’ve been plastic for so long
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