yeah brit, i get your point. (and my comment regarding those types of customers wasn't directed at you!).
but when you mention something like heritage... part of the heritage is the toledo plant... that made tanks and stuff during the war while it churned out jeeps... still where every wrangler has been made ever since.
the renegade is made in italy... on an alfa platform... that is fwd based... with a german transmission...
really going against the heritage if i do say so myself. your mentioning of porsche is kind of funny... even on a base model... or a luxury model... or a sedan.. or an suv, their purpose is to be a high end sports car. drivelines are all geared towards being similar... more power, rwd based, driver first. porsche is probably the worst brand you could have picked!
under the jeep brand, there are engines for efficiency, for torque, for hp, for racing, for towing... paired with fwd, rwd, awd, 4x4... unibody or body on frame... vehicles meant to sell in the mid teens to vehicles over 100000 grand. they are all over the place.
Fair point, a lot of the brand heritage is in the styling on the Renegade. Isn't that true of most manufacturers though? You're making it sound like the Alfa platform and ZF transmission are a bad thing. The Alfa Giulietta is a great little car and if you didn't have that modern platform to use, you would still be using the Dodge Caliber platform... The ZF, particularly the 8-speed is used by many of the world's best luxury vehicles...it's a great transmission. Dodge don't exactly have the best rep for transmissions anyway do they? Why did I get rid of my 2001 Grand Cherokee? The transmission s*** itself! Also, it's a transverse engine platform, so better for packaging in a smaller vehicle and hence the need for a front-biased AWD system. You could make a "proper" body-on-frame small SUV with low-range and diff locks and all that but then you would end up with a Suzuki Jimny and believe me, you wouldn't want that! It could be quite expensive and not very competitive with other manufacturers. Don't get me wrong, the Jimny is a very rugged little SUV that has the potential to shame a Land Rover Defender off-road but you wouldn't want to spend any length of time on the highway in one. I've owned a Fiat 500 and I wouldn't say the Renegade drives anything like that, it still has a Jeep character and feel to it in my opinion. We could go on and extend this to the Grand Cherokee (and Chrysler 300), which run on Mercedes-Benz platforms, which leaves the Wrangler as the only "pure" Jeep. It's very cool and iconic (not unlike the Land Rover Defender) but it's not going to be suitable for everyone.
Platform-sharing has made Jeep more accessible as a brand. Look at Land Rover in comparison. Since its divorce from British Leyland and subsequently Austin Rover, Rover, BMW and Ford, they don't have any "cheaper" brands to borrow stuff from. The Freelander used to be their entry-level model...and was based on the same platform as the subcompact Rover 200 and used Rover engines. The use of Rover switchgear in the interior was also pretty obvious. Not a great car really but it was quite affordable. Today, you can get an Evoque or Discovery Sport and maybe they feel a bit more luxurious and "bespoke" but you won't get much change from $50k even for a relatively basic one. Like the Renegade/Compass/Cherokee, some might also say that these two models aren't "proper" Land Rovers but like Jeeps, AWD/4WD Land Rovers all have a modicum of off-road ability. Oh, and they use the same "German" transmissions as Jeep! Land Rover have done alright in recent years and they now have three platforms to build on but if they had been part of a bigger group, then they might have been able to expand a bit quicker. The Defender cool and iconic though it was, was pretty badly built and in most objective measures not very good, plus quite expensive to build due to its traditional construction. Still no sign of a replacement though.
I'll stick by my guns re Porsche. Don't forget that Porsche is a member of the VW group. To be fair, I think that the original Panamera might have been all Porsche but scratch the surface of the new one and you'll find an Audi A8, likewise the Macan is based on an Audi Q5 and a Cayenne on a VW Touareg and they're built on the same production line in Bratislava in Germa...no wait, Slovakia! They even share some V6 gasoline and diesel engines. I'm not saying that's a bad thing necessarily and I'm sure that the Porsche engineers have made some tweaks to make them a sharper drive but a 2 ton diesel automatic Macan with a VW/Audi engine is pretty far removed from my ideals of what a Porsche should be like. With regards to pricing, it's just as diverse if not more so, just starting at a higher level. $55k for a basic Macan up to $300k+ for a 911 GT2 RS (doesn't look like you can buy a 918 anymore which would have been even more).
