In Defense Of The Most Controversial Jeep Ever Made: The 2014-2018 Cherokee (KL)

We all plan ahead right? Despite this very website appearing to be thrown together at the last moment by a team of drunken circus performers, behind the scenes it is somewhat organized. David is planning to return to a feral existence if we add another 200 members in the month of April. Being an autismist, my calendar is organized with a precision that would shame one of Field Marshall Montgomery’s battle plans. Torch’s plans for the day don’t usually extend beyond putting on a pair of pants, but we do have Zoom calls and spreadsheets and other professional tools to keep Matt from aging in dog years. But imagine if you had to think much further ahead. The process of designing a car starts about five years before it hits the showrooms, and it may stay in production with minor changes for ten years. Trying to navigate consumer tastes and changing market conditions across a fifteen year timespan is an incredibly difficult needle to thread.

We’re constantly hearing car manufacturers don’t take risks, and car design is the same old same old. Lighting graphics, surfacing and trim features get rehashed and regurgitated repeatedly across different companies cars with diminishing returns. There are reasons for this (I’m not saying they’re good reasons) which I’ll explain in a bit, but sometimes OEMs do make bold design choices with the aim of doing something different, only to walk it back come facelift time. The 2014 KL Cherokee is a gold plated example of this phenomena. Despite extremely strong sales its novel split headlight arrangement and aero look visage proved controversial, so Jeep gave the KL a more conventional front graphic halfway through the car’s life cycle. In the face of upsetting a small but vocal subset of buyers who the Cherokee wasn’t intended for, Jeep didn’t have the courage of their design convictions.

Before we get into the KL Cherokee and why I’m devoting a Damn Good Design to it, we need to understand the how OEMs use the design process to differentiate their vehicles in the marketplace. Companies that have a strong brand image try to design vehicles that visually reflect and support their heritage. This is usually premium brands, because having a consistent identity is important to the customers who buy those cars. Someone in the market for a Bentley, Porsche or Land Rover for example, want it to look like one because they are buying into an image – their car is not only a reflection of how they see themselves but how they want others to see them. Visual continuity is everything. When I first saw the 2022 L460 Range Rover in 2017, I thought it looked extremely clean and modern, but maybe a bit safe and conservative. But a Range Rover is an iconic car that’s been in production since 1970, so that is exactly what Range Rover customers want: the same as it’s always been, simply better and newer.

For more mass market OEMs the situation is a bit different because they don’t necessarily sell on image, status or capability. Customers are more likely to buy based on more prosaic concerns like value, reliability, economy, practicality, availability and what their peers drive. Not having to adhere to a specific look or vehicle type occasionally liberates mainstream companies, which is why some of the most bonkers, revolutionary and interesting cars come from this part of the market. But most of the time they play it safe and follow prevailing fashions, which is why we see the same visual treatments appearing on cars from different companies, leading to them having a superficial resemblance to each other.

Just Play The Hits

Some mainstream brands are lucky enough to have kept an iconic car in their line up for decades, like the Mustang, or have reintroduced one to great success, like the Challenger. Although their value in terms of heritage is priceless, in general cars like these are stand alone outliers with little visual impact on the rest of the range, although that hasn’t stopped Ford attempting to warp the Mustang identity onto a five door electric crossover or Fiat turning its cars into a range of various sized 500 shaped blobs. Renault is currently softening the EV transition blow by making its latest electric models reincarnations of the much loved 4 and 5, demonstrating the value of raiding the back catalog.

And then there’s Jeep, which like Mini sits slightly above the mainstream with a brand image and cultural heritage to die for. Along with my old friends Land Rover, Jeep is the preeminent manufacturer of capable off-the-shelf off-roaders. With Land Rover selling cars to television housewives and the landed gentry, Jeep has remained a remarkably accessible and resilient brand, successfully building chunky urban assault sub-compacts at the bottom, slightly less visually compelling six-figure Range Rover rivals at the top, and everything in between. The Jeep oeuvre is stacked with beloved classics from the J series pickups, the SJ Wagoneer, the XJ Cherokee and the  ZJ Grand Cherokee. Bestriding the lot like a colossus is the Wrangler, a direct descendant of the legendary second world war Willys Jeep. These cars are the wheeled embodiment of American ideals about rugged individualism and the great outdoors.

What Made The XJ So Special

The original XJ Cherokee was a seminal moment in the evolution of the SUV. It marked the turning point when SUVs began to move away from body on frame boneshakers to something more every day and refined. Jeep was able to leverage their tie-up with Renault to utilize the French company’s pioneering CAD/CAM expertise to create a unibody SUV that was smaller, but roomier and much more economical than the SJ based cars it ostensibly replaced. Access to the Renault dealer network helped the XJ, along with the TJ Wrangler spearhead one of the only successful and lasting invasions by a US brand into the European market. Over an incredible 18 production run nearly 3 million were sold worldwide. After the Wrangler, it’s probably the most important car in Jeep history.

Unfortunately when it came time to replace the XJ, Chrysler had entered its disastrous merger of equals with Mercedes-Benz, another company in the middle of having its engineering-first principles gutted in the name of cost-cutting and efficiency. Subsequently, the KJ and KK Liberty replacements were pastiches, leaning too hard into caricature Jeep stylistic elements and compromised by longitudinal layout that hurt their packaging and economy. Known as Cherokee elsewhere in the world, in the US they were given the jingoistic Liberty moniker. The KJ lasted only six years before being heavily retooled to become the KK, which itself stayed in production until 2012. The KJ was by far the stronger seller, nearly 900k units finding homes but the KK fared much worse with less than half that.

It’s worth taking another pause to focus the hindsightometer on this part of the Cherokee story. Jeep had a beloved, successful and iconic vehicle in the XJ Cherokee, but chose not to continue the nameplate. This is always an undertaking fraught with peril, especially for a car that had been in production for so long. If your new car is a galactic leap forwards and the previous model has negative connotations then absolutely, it can be worth trying – think about how the Focus replaced the Escort. But with a car that is a fundamental part of your heritage like the Cherokee, we will see you are potentially playing with fire by denying yourself the opportunity to tweak the formula for the times. The other side of this coin is keeping a nameplate on a car that is fundamentally a different prospect to its predecessor also risks outrage. The new Defender was never going to be a like-for-like replacement for the iconic original, because the basic utilitarian market had long since moved on to things like quad bikes and John Deere Gators, and Land Rover simply didn’t have the resources for an all-new body-on-frame platform it could only use on one vehicle. Land Rover have been slowly working their way upmarket and a Defender with live axles just wouldn’t do, darling. This is what I mean when I say it’s a tricky needle to thread – you have to consider not just where you were, but where you are going.

And where Chrysler was going was bankruptcy. As Chrysler emerged from the ashes in 2009 after the disastrous Daimler-Benz and Cerberus years, Fiat became the major shareholders of the wreckage, giving Jeep access to a new box full of Italian toys. Although Jeep still had the Compass and Patriot road-based crossovers, they were ghastly holdovers based on an old Mitsubishi platform. The new KL Cherokee would use the more up-to-date Fiat Compact platform, first seen underneath the 2010 Alfa Romeo Giulietta and tweaked for the 2012 Dodge Dart and 2014 Chrysler 200.

Why The KL Turned Out The Way It Did

The brand new KL Cherokee was unveiled at the 2013 New York International Auto Show. Led by long-time Jeep designer Greg Howell, it was a much smoother and more approachable-looking car than anything else Jeep had at the time. With a shallow aero nose, a sharp horizontal break in the trademark grill and controversially, a split headlight arrangement that at that point had only been seen on the equally eye popping Nissan Juke, it was something completely fresh and a world away from the weekend warrior cars that constituted the rest of the lineup. In a precursor to the outrage prior to the launch of the new Defender, the main bone of contention with the hardcore Jeep fans was the absence of live axles. On a crossover. When our old pals Jalopnik leaked the then-unnamed new crossover in pilot build form, the comment section exploded in frothing outrage that descended into borderline racism and ableism. According to them, it simply didn’t deserve to be called Cherokee, a storied nameplate that had been absent from American soil for twelve years.

Jeep were stuck between a rock and a hard place. The existing Compass and Patriot had laid the groundwork for more road-biased Jeeps, but the Cherokee name in the eyes of fans was sacrosanct. It meant live axles and a tested ability to cross the Rubicon Trail, a rite of passage for any Jeep. The problem is this is a specific level of off-road ability that the majority of Jeep owners don’t really use. It highlights the tension between what your brand actually stands for, and how customers use their vehicles. In 2019 head of Jeep design Mark Allen told ABC News that only 10 to 15% of Wrangler owners take them off-roading. And that’s the Wrangler. From a design point of view Jeep made absolutely the right decision in basing the KL Cherokee on a modified FWD car platform, although it’s worth noting they made significant adaptations to give the Cherokee genuine off-road ability, especially for the Trailhawk versions.

It Was Successful Until They Made It Boring

Despite all the controversy the first version of the KL Cherokee sold very well. And then sold some more. According to Wikipedia, over 1 million made it onto driveways across America, selling 240k in 2018 alone. Added to that is a further quarter of a million units for the rest of the world. When the more conventionally faced 2019 model arrived, merging the split lighting and making the grill slightly more upright, sales began to taper off, slowly at first and then off a cliff. There were worldwide mitigating factors that contributed to some of this, but across 2022 and 2023 barely 65k Cherokees were sold. It’s not clear whether will be directly replaced.

The other thing to consider when thinking about the KL Cherokee is who was paying the bills. Fiat knew what they had with the Jeep brand – remember earlier I said the original XJ and YJ Wrangler had established a beachhead in Europe – always a tricky market for American car brands to penetrate. Fiat wanted to further increase Jeeps presence in Europe from slightly leftfield choice to a genuine mainstream alternative, so a less bellicose and aggressive vehicle would be necessary to expand sales here because an overt tacticool influence is seen as a bit naff.

Now I’m not going to sit here and argue the KL Cherokee is an amazingly brilliant, epoch shaking piece of automotive design, because it isn’t. Not every car can be a Citroen DS or indeed the original Willys, and nor should they be. Good design isn’t about creating high art every time the Bic hits the paper – it’s about designing the right product for the right time, and making it as pleasing as possible for the intended customers. And customers do like distinctive looking vehicles if they have substance to them. One of the reasons the original Nissan Juke was so successful was because it didn’t look like anything else on the road, and the young (and young at heart) market it was aimed at appreciated that, along with its low purchasing price and running costs. The 1998 Fiat Multipla was delightfully bonkers, but behind its radioactive amphibian looks was a genuinely brilliant MPV. It was not a car for everybody, but owners really fell head over heels with their visual individuality and versatility. The 2014 KL Cherokee was nothing like as challenging as the Fiat and was perfectly judged for its target audience of non-traditional Jeep buyers.

I really liked it when it was released, and still do. It struck me as a fresh, bold take on the Jeep identity that was a distinct alternative to the bland crossovers available elsewhere . In the time between the XJ and the KL the odd-road market had changed considerably, and the Cherokee had to adapt to that to remain relevant. Sadly for the hardcore, that meant ditching the clanking railway engineering between the wheels and the body. I asked David, a man who if you cut him open would have the word Jeep written through him like a stick of rock, if he would have bought a KL Cherokee if it had live axles. He said no, because he’d rather have a Wrangler.

Case fucking closed my friends. Case closed.

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