How I turned from a Jeep Wrangler enthusiast to a Wrangler-hater in just one day. All it took was renting the car.
Decided to drive from Atlanta to Chattanooga (the one from Glenn Miller’s “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and “Sun Valley Serenade”). That’s about 200 miles (300 km). And I took the beloved 2019 Jeep Wrangler Sahara. Brand new.
I’ll skip details about the discomfort of the interior (narrow), controls, and glasswork – that’s a matter of taste and style, and I didn’t like a lot there. But the worst thing about the Wrangler is the Death Wobble, and I experienced it all the way today. It would have been good to know about it beforehand.
Atlanta-Chattanooga: good roads, no traffic lights, and a speed limit of 70 miles per hour allow you to speed up to 120 km/h and drive like that for almost two hours without barely slowing down. A perfectly smooth road turns into sections with slight unevenness. And then it starts! At the speed of 120 km/h – shaking and harsh vibration of the entire car, which stops if you slow down to about 40-50 km/h.
Today, I had this issue about three times, each time requiring a combination of two factors: speed over 100 km/h and uneven road (or better, suddenly uneven). Learned to slow down in advance on uneven roads, and simply not to drive so fast at night.
Maybe that’s normal for a car that is supposed to be an off-roader, not for highways, but damn it, it’s the twenty-first century, others seem to manage. Do you know any other car that goes into death wobble at 120?
By the way, a day’s rental of the Wrangler at Routes cost only 24 bucks (I stupidly paid six more to the broker HolidayCars). Ridiculously cheap. Kept waiting for the catch, but so far so good, hopefully, it won’t happen.
In general, now I love my Toyota RAV4 even more 🙂
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 