2009 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Rubicon on 2040-cars

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Vile Gossip: My Jeep Wrangler dreams

Jean Jennings has been writing about cars for more than 30 years, after stints as a taxicab driver and as a mechanic in the Chrysler Proving Grounds Impact Lab. She was a staff writer at Car and Driver magazine, the first executive editor and former president and editor-in-chief of Automobile Magazine, the founder of the blog Jean Knows Cars and former automotive correspondent for Good Morning America. She has lifetime awards from both the Motor Press Guild and the New England Motor Press Association. Look for more Vile Gossip columns in the future.The new 2018 Jeep Wrangler's model designation is JL, my original initials, as in Jean Lienert. Don't Google that. You'll find I died in 2014 in Pittsburgh at age 85. I take this JL thing as a sign from God that I am supposed to finally buy a new Wrangler, the very first car of my dreams when my dreams included saving $25,000 and living off the grid in a one-room log cabin with all of my cast iron pots and pans. I did live in a tiny log cabin once, but when I discovered there was no line for phone, fax and printer, I trudged down the dirt road a half mile, knocked on a stranger's door and borrowed their phone to call AT&T. So much for living off the grid. And so much for the Wrangler. I bought a truck, which was useful, but it was not a Jeep, a fact confirmed when I landed a job writing about cars. Among the Porsches and Fords and Ferraris and Dodge Power Wagons were Jeep Wranglers. Wranglers meant adventure. Here are two favorites:1981 — Delivering the Pig of Bronze, Car and Driver's over-accessorized 1978 project Jeep CJ-7 (named for its chrome hood ornament), to the police chief of rural Waterloo, Neb. He got it because he wrote the editor a letter asking for it. It was my assignment to drive it there. I plotted as many miles of dirt roads as possible between Michigan and Nebraska, not wanting to waste my first big Jeep adventure on pavement and never questioning the ability of this denim-trimmed orange Jeep and its aftermarket aluminum wheels to get us there.So naive. Somewhere in deepest Iowa with the windshield flipped down to the hood for maximum coolness, the Pig's rear end began to shudder. As we rolled to a stop, the photographer looked back in time to see one of the five fancy extra-long chrome lug nuts plop into the dust. Two others had vanished. The last two had backed off to the ends of their studs.

Jeep Renegade pricing to start at $18,595?

While there's no shortage of excitement surrounding the new Jeep Renegade, one of the limiting factors to the little trucklet will be its price. With the Kia Soul starting at $14,900 and the Nissan Juke kicking off at $18,990, the Renegade can't afford to stray away from that price bracket.
And judging by some potentially leaked pricing info, it won't. A quick Google search of "Jeep Renegade Price" reveals (at least for now) that the Italian-built Jeep will start at $18,595. The "as shown" price of $25,895 seems to indicate the Trailhawk model shown on Jeep's consumer page.
If the $18,595 figure is correct, it's likely for the base, two-wheel-drive Sport model, with the Latitude and Limited trims falling somewhere between there and the $25,895 as-equipped price of the Trailhawk.

Chrysler investigating complaints of vehicles with faulty power modules

Chrysler owners are hopping mad after experiencing a series of electrical gremlins in some of the company's vehicles. Issues range from mere annoyances - windows rolling down and radios turning off of their own accord - to serious safety issues, with headlights that randomly shut off at night and cars that stall and refuse to start.
The issues are being blamed on the total integrated power module, which can cost up to $1,000 for customers to replace. This, of course, has led to a hefty batch of complaints to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, with 240 owners expressing their displeasure so far. Another site, CarComplaints.com, has registered over 300 complaints relating to the 2010 to 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee and Dodge Durango, alone, according to The New York Times.
Chrysler has acknowledged that it's investigating the complaints and is analyzing the faulty TIPMs, but that isn't quite enough for customers of the affected vehicles. The newspaper has snagged a few of the more harrowing tales with the electrically challenged Chrysler products, culled from the NHTSA complaints.