Iconic American carmaker Jeep is back in India. And the Cherokee looks the part of a brutal off-roader but with a great sense of style.
And now, onto the faults. The single biggest complaint we have is with the interiors – sure, the top half of the dashboard is covered in soft-touch materials and there’s a nice slab of black coloured wood that runs the breadth of the dash, but it’s the lower half that’s a bit off sync. It’s made up of well-finished, but hard plastic that simply doesn’t feel of as high quality as you would expect in a luxury car. Then there’s the touchscreen, which isn’t as slick as, say, BMW’s iDrive or Audi’s MMI systems, and even the seven-inch screen between the dials has some annoyingly downmarket fonts and even cheap-looking overlapping text! The controls are also not the most intuitive – Jeep has gone for a single ‘super stalk’ like Mercedes, with wiper, headlight and indicator controls on it.
Then there’s all the confusing buttons on the steering wheel – 22 of them, to be precise – that simply don’t have the tactility that the Germans seem to manage so easily. The big slab of silver plastic on the centre console is pretty ‘Toyota Land Cruiser’ as well. It’s not terrible, but what the Grand Cherokee’s cabin is sorely missing is that last bit of attention to detail that makes the German cars feel special.