I’ll tell you what I think of the JKU after I pick up the wife’s new one tomorrow.
We’ve had our 2 door for a bit over 5 years now and the wife absolutely loves it.
As far as owning a JK goes, regardless of 2 door or 4 door….
It’s all about compromise.
If you’re going to throw a few basic mods under it and go have some fun off road, then you should absolutely go for it!
But if you’re not going to wheel it properly, then all of the compromises of daily Wrangler life aren’t really worth it in my opinion.
They do have their good points.
Fuel economy on the newer 3.6L is much better then the big overweight wagons that the 2 big names are selling at ridiculous prices these days.
There’s plenty of power on tap and with the 6 speed manual you can easily burn all of the flat brim hat wearing P platers in their Hiluxs and Navaras off the lights, if that’s your thing.
And they are much more mechanically stable then the web warriors would have you believe too.
The only mechanical issue that we’ve had over 5 years of pretty serious off-road wheeling has been the ball joints, we only get about 25,000km out of them.
The only other issue we had was that the hard top leaked a bit of water when we first bought it, so we put the soft top on and never looked back.
Cruising up the beach at Fraser or Straddy with the top down is great fun….
But I guess the whole point of owning a wrangler is with just a few basic mods you can drop the tyre pressures, disconnect the sway bar, hit the tracks and put a huge smile on your dial.
They obviously also have bad points, which I think will effect you the most;
Space inside is severely compromised.
Payload is a joke.
They handle like a bit of a pig on the highway and can get pretty tiring on long drives if you’re not used to these sorts of vehicles.
In stock form the access isn’t too bad, but if they’re lifted the oldies really struggle getting in and out.
For a family wagon doing the shopping/school run with a few highway km in between, there’s probably better options in my opinion.
Having said that, the wife absolutely loves them and I expect we’ll have a wrangler parked in our driveway for many more years in one form or another.
And as the one that does all of the mechanical work on our vehicles, the JK hasn’t annoyed me too much yet. Besides, I’m pretty good at changing ball joints now.
We’re only going to the 4 door so we can legally tow the camper.
The 2 door is only rated to 1000kg braked towing capacity and our camper is 980kg tare.
You can legally tow more weight with a 1.3l, 960kg Jimny then you can with a 3.6l, 1.8 ton JK, go figure…
The new JL models do have better towing figures, but they’re currently asking Toyota prices for band new ones.
So we decided to buy a very low km last of the JKs and wait until the car market gets back to some sort of normal to get a JL Rubicon.
