Rental Review: 2023 Jeep Wrangler 4xe Sahara

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Let’s start with the obvious: that’s not a 2023 Wrangler 4xe. Rather, it is a 1995-ish Toyota HiAce Living Saloon EX 4x4.

Given the choice between a 2023 Wrangler 4xe and a 1995 HiAce Living Saloon EX 4x4, you should strongly consider the latter.

Unless you want to do 80mph somewhere, or crash at any speed whatsoever, in which you should look at the Wrangler. Since that’s most of us, let’s put the HiAce aside for now and discuss the “Silver Zynith” Sahara model I rented for the Long Beach.

(The rather disturbing tale of that trip is here. )

My test example arrived with 2,810 miles and no evidence of abuse. If you were to order one like it for yourself, you’d be in for an approximate sticker price of $58,180; it had a hard top but did not have the extra-cost active cruise control or towing group options.

That’s not a typo; this four-cylinder Jeep is nearly sixty grand. Twenty grand less than a 392-powered Wrangler, but nearly twice as much as a base two-door Wrangler, and $13,000 above a V6 Sahara four-door. It’s also priced heads-up with a Land Rover Defender S that actually offers a slightly more comprehensive suite of standard features. You can’t say that Stellantis is unwilling to capitalize on the Jeep brand.

I should also note that a lovely ex-girlfriend of mine had a beautiful six-speed manual Sahara Unlimited four-door which cost her just thirty-five grand. I suspect she still has it. Probably still worth what she paid for it.

Alright. No sense bitching about how much this one costs. Either you see it as a value or you don’t.

Unhappily, neither my hotel nor any available parking venue I could find around Long Beach offered a plug for charging. Most of the 4xe Unique Selling Proposition revolves around being able to take trips up to 21 miles without turning on the engine. Happily, the Wrangler offers a refreshingly simple control move for this: there’s an “EV” button and a “Hybrid” button. Press the former, and you’ll be exclusively on electric power no matter what until you run out charge, which in my test was about two miles. At that point, the two-liter turbo will fire up and take over. Other than a dashboard notification there’s no drama associated with this event.

This has to be the noisiest EV in history, by the way. Between the Sahara-spec tires, which don’t approach the silliness of the Rubicon but are still plenty crunchy, and the barn-door aerodynamics, the electric Wrangler is continually making noise. What did you expect?

When the engine is running, it does a pretty good noise-vibration-harshness impression of the industrial turbodiesel in my Mahinda Roxor, minus the latter’s eagerness to rev. Unlike Toyota or Ford hybrids, the Wrangler isn’t always eager to shut its engine off. I spent a lot of time idling at the In-and-Out drive-thru lane, with the windows down and the A/C off, wondering why the 2.0 was still spinning.

Once the engine does shut off, restarts are handled very competently, with little in the way of jerking around. In “Hybrid” mode, the 4xe can muster some half-decent acceleration up to an aero wall around 70mph. You won’t frighten any Teslas, but those of us who remember the glacial pace at which four-banger TJ and YJ Wranglers operated, it’s quite gratifying. There’s some dude out there who turned a high thirteen-second quarter-mile in one! It never feels slow, or overwhelmed by weight. Truth be told, it might be too fast, because as the old song said, the brakes are good and the tires are fair; in wet weather the 4xe is fair game for strong crosswinds, which can shove the Jeep around in worrisome fashion. It also has a genuine fondness for tramlining, which is classic Jeep behavior.

Not so classic-Jeep: the ride, which approaches “decent” in most circumstances. There’s nothing particularly punishing about freeway or downtown time in the 4xe, likely thanks to the long wheelbase and squishy sidewalls. The seats, too, are better than what you used to get in Wranglers, even in the past ten years.

Driven without much verve or passion, the 4xe returned 19.2mpg in Hybrid mode. Never did I consciously treat it like a hybrid, because most of the time I was dead tired or in a nontrivial hurry. Measured against, say, my 2021 Canyon Denali V6, which feels a little quicker and returns better mileage, this is not brilliant — but the irony here is that the Canyon is an aerodynamic masterpiece next to the Wrangler, plus it’s every bit of 700 pounds (!) lighter. I distinctly recall 2.5-liter Wrangler two-doors struggling to get 20mpg back in the day, even with manual transmissions. So in context it’s impressive.

photo of a fully loaded 4xe given to some mommyblogger or some shit like that. mine didn’t look anything like this

The interior of the new Wranglers is considerably better than what you got in the previous model, to say nothing of the YJ And TJ. Plenty of soft touch material, off-road styling, chrome trim, half-decent leather. The automatic shift lever is comically oversized, with a red selector trigger and the silhouette of a Mahindra Roxor old Jeep on the top of the knob. The seats are supportive. The cruise control is precise and easy to use.

uConnect is still probably the best interface out there, particularly if you’re limited to a relatively small screen as is the case in the Wrangler. I did notice that the load time has gone way up since the last generation. Nor was it always enthusiastic about pairing with my prole-class Galaxy phone. Stereo quality was better than anything I’ve heard in a Wrangler up to this point, which is to say about as good in a base Accord.

Fair warning: if you want to use uConnect voice commands in a Wrangler, even with the hard top on, you’ll want to do it before you exceed 20mph.

In a perfect world, I’d have had a pretty girl to ride with me through Malibu and a place to store various doors and top components. So, like, a pretty girl with a garage in SoCal. In other words, an heiress. Alas, I did not, and that leads to the core issue with this post: Evaluating a Wrangler without removing the body panels is like when they let Dan Neil review performance cars; you never get to the reason people would buy such a thing.

edited! i found a photo! from when i parked it at the race and didn’t want to forget where it was! this photo is of course not up to the quality of what you would get from dw burnett, aka “puppyknuckles”, aka the fuckin mook whose drunken misbehavior i hid from potential employers for years, only to find out that he won’t work with me, i think he thinks i banged his ex girlfriend, i totally did not do that

Therefore, the most I can tell you is whether the much-ballyhooed 4xe package “ruins” the Wrangler in any way. I would say it does not. Wranglers are perhaps better suited for extra hybrid machinery than most, since they are already noisy, piggy, space-spendthrift creatures. And in theory anyway they spend a lot of time going slow.

I know more than a couple people with sub-ten-mile commutes and a variety of weather conditions throughout the year. For them, the 4xe makes sense. All the Jeep stuff, plus you rarely have to fill it up, plus you have some additional usability courtesy of the EV mode. Therefore, I don’t consider the 4xe badge to be incontrovertible proof of idiocy the way, for example, the ownership of a Cayenne Hybrid would be. Spend another ten grand or so over a V6 Wrangler, you obtain some useful capabilities. Sounds reasonable.

Will it be durable? Silly question. Jeeps have never been durable. Just repairable. And if enough of them are sold, the aftermarket will work out a way to keep them running for a long time.

Something about this do-it-all hybrid four-door automatic-transmission Jeep strikes me as being very well adjusted to our modern society. I could be glib and say that you’d be better off spending the money on a Civic and a Roxor, or a base F-150 and a cheap side-by-side — but who has extra parking spaces now? This Wrangler just about does it all, from sunny-day pleasure trips to light furniture hauling. Plus you can plug it in. I’m not sure it does any of these things very well, but the same criticism could be made of a Swiss Army Knife. It’s the feeling of capacity in reserve, of not being forced to ask your anonymous neighbors for help.

Pros: EV and hybrid modes are well engineered. Comfortable. Well equipped. Roof and doors are removable. Goes very well.

Cons: Stops and turns very badly. No escape from the noise. Not secure against intrusion, Weighs two and a half tons. Costs more than a 2006 Phaeton V8 or a 2023 Land Rover Defender S.

Summary: Adding battery power to the Wrangler is neither a desecration nor a disaster, but I’d prefer my Jeep as either a base two-door V6 for a practicality or a loaded 392 for the Barrett-Jackson auctions of 2050.