Jeep Wrangler Rubicon - long-term review

Grab your sunglasses (not the fashionable ones – the ones welders use) and pray for your retinas as a bright green Mojito monster truck has entered the Top Gear Garage. Ladies and gents, fans and haters, please give a warm welcome to our brand new Jeep Wrangler Rubicon. Things are going to get mucky.

Yep, an icon is in the house. To a three-year-old, a Jeep is what car looks like. A crayon sketch gloriously exploding into life. And the Wrangler is the OG. This is the brand that gave the world the go-anywhere 4x4 during World War II, and now gives it to anyone who wants to pop to the Co-op. They were basic, hardy, and staggeringly effective – an off-road utility vehicle born from military necessity. Things haven’t changed.

The Wrangler first appeared in 1986 as a spiritual successor to the Willys MB and CJ series, and kept the square jaw, removable doors, and hose-down ethos. Our latest ‘JL’ model does the same. It’s just got a few more creature comforts, a revised grille, and some zingy LED headlights.

It's remained defiantly traditional, even as the rest of the world shifted towards sanitised crossovers and bloated SUVs. Only a few hundred are sold here each year (limited by CO₂ fleet averages more than demand), and we only get the binary choice of five-door hardtop versions in Sahara or Rubicon trim.

The Sahara is road-biased, with larger wheels wrapped in tarmac-friendly tyres, full-time four-wheel drive, and chrome accents that favour plushness over punishment. The Rubicon laughs in its face. And that’s what we’ve got. Named after the Californian trail, it swaps chrome for grit, and ride comfort for rock clearance. It’s got short gearing, a locking rear diff, a sway bar that decouples, and tyres that could double as flotation devices. There are also rock rails, heavy-duty suspension, a proper transfer case, and Off-Road Plus Mode.

In the UK, our sole powerplant is now the 2.0-litre turbocharged four-cylinder petrol engine (not the diesel, nor the 4xe hybrid), paired with an eight-speed automatic gearbox as standard. Those four cylinders do their best to impersonate a V6, producing 272bhp and 295lb ft. In a car that weighs over two tonnes, progress is... leisurely. 0–62mph takes 7.4 seconds, and it won’t reach triple figures – it tops out at 99mph. But this isn’t a car for performance, especially on chunky BF Goodrich Mud-Terrain tyres.

Inside, our car has power-adjustable Nappa leather seats (heated, naturally), dual-zone climate control, an Alpine sound system that could cause landslides, and a massive 12.3in touchscreen with CarPlay and ambient lighting. There’s also a reversing camera, carpeted floors, and – wait for it – illuminated vanity mirrors. So you can reapply mascara mid-dune. Or mid-downpour in Dartmoor.

In this world of endless optional extras, ours has only two – and they’re both fantastic. The bright Mojito Green paint and – the pièce de résistance – the roof. A full-length canvas ‘Sky One-Touch Power Top’ (the naming department clearly took the day off), which concertinas back like you’re opening a tin of sardines with a single push, instantly flooding the cabin with light, air, and a faint whiff of whatever the local restaurant’s cooking. It’s extremely liberating and fun. Also useful if you’re a keen smoker – the Wrangler even has an old-school cigarette lighter in the dashboard, not just a 12V port. Need more air? Remove the doors, lower the windscreen, and take off the back (if you don’t have the power top).

In a world of millimetric panel gap quality control, the Wrangler is laughable. There are exposed rubber seals, flappy plastics, and they didn’t even bother to paint the final third of our roof – it’s still in raw, unpainted plastic. You can see bits of the floor, the crash structure, and – despite its massive size – I, at 6ft 2in, can barely fit in it. And you have to pay £69,335 for the privilege. That’s seventy grand.

And it gets more expensive: I’m already finding it catastrophically uneconomical. Fuel economy hovers around 23mpg officially. In reality? I’m getting between 14-17mpg. Emissions are 269g/km, which earns it a £1,490 hit in first-year VED, plus £620 annually after that, and the dreaded £425 luxury tax every year until it’s old enough to qualify for a blue plaque.

But they hold their value. Jeep people are odd, loyal creatures, and the Wrangler retains a cultish desirability. Look up a three-year-old Rubicon and you’ll still be parting with north of £45k.

And people on the street seem to love it. I’ve already found it mightily enchanting. It has presence, character – a sort of unreconstructed, hairy-chested honesty that’s all but extinct in the automotive world, and what Jim Ratcliffe has tried to re-engineer with the Ineos Grenadier. You sit bolt upright, steering something that feels less like a car and more like an opinion. The diffs lock via a rocker switch. Low range is selected with a proper mechanical lever – not a screen, not an algorithm. A lever. It’s charmingly, unrelentingly analogue. It’s functional and physical in a way the new Defender – with its nerdy e-diffs and Terrain Response – simply isn’t.

But the Rubicon isn’t here to make sense. It’s here to make a mess, make a point, and make us smile. And to be modified. But we’ll let you know about that soon.

I’ve not looked forward to running a long-termer quite this much. It’s got potential. It’s got presence. It’s got places to go and ridiculous ways of getting there. No doubt it’ll frustrate me. It will refuse to fit in parking spaces with that awful underbite bumper. It’ll do U-turns like an aircraft carrier and sulk on the motorway. But it’s got potential to go places I’ve never been. To become a teammate. And it’s already made lots of people smile. Including me.