One of the toughest things about getting older is watching many of the things you love disappear, and there’s often nothing you can do about it. One of those things, for me, was what I’m going to call the “Cheap Cherokee Era” — a time when true off-road capability was democratized in a way the world had never seen before and has not seen since.
I’m not even 34 yet, but I’m already feeling quite old, especially when I reminisce about where the car world stood just 10 years ago, when I started as a car journalist.
Back then, enthusiasts were still obsessed with brown diesel manual wagons, EVs were barely a thing, and not every car on the road was an expensive crossover. We were at the tail end of many golden eras, but the one I want to talk about today is one near and dear to my heart.
The one vehicle that has stirred my soul more than any other — and that changed my life’s trajectory entirely — was the 1992 Jeep Cherokee XJ you see above, a vehicle that I bought for $1,400 from a Craigslist seller at my college football stadium parking lot. The burgundy machine had 218,000 miles on the clock, rusty rocker panels, and some bad oil leaks, but I didn’t care because it was mine.
That Jeep introduced me to a beautiful world — one of genuine classlessness, a diverse world of people from every walk of life. The Jeep Cherokee democratized off-road capability like no vehicle ever. This is the true story of the XJ; as entertaining as Jason Cammisa’s “The XJ Jeep Cherokee was America’s Favorite Hot Hatch” YouTube video that everyone keeps sending me is, that title does not at all describe the XJ and what it meant to the world. The XJ was the great equalizer. It was the “disposable Jeep.”
Jeep sold over 2.8 million XJs between the 1984 and 2001 model-years, with a bunch of clones in China coming thereafter. It wasn’t until 1987 that the XJ really became the XJ we know and love thanks to the introduction of the “bulletproof” four-liter, though I’d say 1991 to 2001 models are the ones that really gave meaning to the XJ name. These vehicles, especially if equipped in the most popular way (Chrysler 8.25, NP231 transfer case), were mechanically flawless aside from a few cylinder head casting issues on 2001s.
I don’t mean that literally, in that nothing could possibly fail (ask any XJ owner how many crankshaft position sensors, neutral safety switches, rear upper shock bolts, and oil filter adapter o-rings they’ve had to swap). What I mean was that, from a design standpoint, the major mechanical components — the AMC straight six-derived 4.0-liter, the Aisin-Warner AW4 automatic, the Aisin AX-15 manual, the Dana 30 front axle, the Chrysler 8.25 rear axle, and the NP231 transfer case — could quite literally last 500,000+ miles if properly maintained.
The rest of the car — interior electrics, various sensors and seals and the water pump and alternator and radiator on and on — absolutely had a propensity to fail, and the bodies were as rust prone as steel wool in a salt bath, but the main mechanical bits allowed XJs to just keep on tickin’. And with the sheer volume of XJs out there, it meant a truly reliable machine could be enjoyed by all for — in some cases — just a few hundred bucks.
But XJs didn’t just offer cheap reliability; they appended these two qualities with genuine off-road capability to the point where — on a mass scale — the XJ’s off-road capability-to-price ratio became the highest of any vehicle ever.
I don’t mean there literally were no vehicles that were more capable that you could get for less money, I’m saying that, on a mass scale — probably well over a million XJs still driving around in the U.S. in the mid 2000s — there was nothing that you could easily find on any Craigslist in any city that offered this much capability and durability for this little money, particularly if you did minor modifications.
This is also key to what made the XJ what it was. All it needed was a dirt-cheap and simple (thanks to the dual solid axles) junkyard lift kit (you could use Chevy S10 leaf springs in the back) and some 31-inch tires, and it became a formidable monster off-road that, it’s also worth noting, you could reasonably daily-drive.
It had four-doors and plenty of space inside, it offered good power and decent enough comfort — it was an unbelievably cheap, unbelievably off-road capable, unbelievably reliable machine that anyone — truly anyone — could buy for pennies and live with daily.
And that era is over. Its peak was from about 2005 to about 2015 — the Cheap Cherokee era. And my god was it glorious. Look at that giant mudpit I’m driving through in the image above. Check out the off-roading I’m doing here in that same $600 XJ:
I also hydrolocked my burgundy XJ back in November of 2015 while giving too much skinny-pedal in a deep mudpit. It was no matter, though, because the next morning I bought a replacement engine for $120 from some dudes in a barn, who took me late-night off-roading on their property in — of course — a jacked up XJ.
I later ended up flooding my rear diff while off-roading at Drummond Island:
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But that’s nothing compared to what others were doing with their XJs during the Cheap Cherokee era. For one, the XJ became the GOAT of Tough Truck Challenges, flying high off of jumps and rolling over in slaloms:
XJs were also the darling of budget-off-road challenges like my own and like my friend Fred’s:
Very few vehicles throughout history have been beaten on as hard and at as large of a scale as the Jeep XJ, which was flooded, jumped, bashed into trees and rocks, chopped up and just generally hammered by the masses. Because why not? XJs were cheap, and they were going to stay cheap forever:
The below supercut is great, because it includes this caption:
Jeep Cherokee drivers are incredible to watch. They push their Jeeps harder than anybody I know. They work with what they’ve got and beat the snot out of their rigs. I’ve been making offroad videos for six years, and whenever I need more footage for a video I know to look for the Jeep Cherokees. They ALWAYS do fun stuff and disregard their 4×4’s body. Open diffs & missing windows, these guys just go for the skinny pedal. I made this video to give thanks to all guys that don’t care about the chrome- they just want to wheel!
But of course, Jeep XJs didn’t stay cheap. Sometime shortly after I finished my aforementioned $600 XJ series (the finale did over 250,000 pageviews), XJ prices went through the roof and some folks blame me for it:
But while I undoubtedly made the world love the XJ just that tiny bit more with all of my fawning stories, the timing was just a coincidence (and it wasn’t a direct result of Cash for Clunkers, which happened in the middle of the Cheap Cherokee era). XJ values going up was inevitable, because that’s what happens when a beloved, super high-volume, especially-off-road vehicle gets old.
Nice versions become more scarce, memories of all the wacky off-road adventures turn to nostalgia, people like me who were once young become older and better equipped to spend more money/store cars, and in the end values go up. Nostalgia + disposable income + space = high car values.
On some level, I’m happy about that. Dirt-cheap XJs into infinity means all the vehicles would have beaten on until there were none left, but at the same time, I miss the Cheap Cherokee era. I loved being part of a vehicle community that was truly economically diverse and passionate. The XJ was a gateway into the car world/off-road world, and that period when anyone could get one and enjoy its capability truly to the very limit — it was absolutely epic. And it’s making me want to spend far too much money on another XJ, but a nice one. I’m grown up now, you see.
I keep thinking about this, but for the Renault 4. I know so many people whose first car was a Renault 4 that was headed to the crusher simply because they had zero resale value. A neighbour of mine had one of those, a single-owner, low-mileage one that sat for a few months after the gentleman died. When my neighbour found out the widow was about to junk the car, they offered a symbolic amount for it, and she actually declined the money and gave them the car. It came with a very nice vintage Blaupunkt stereo he didn’t need, so years later, he ended up selling it for way more than the sum he offered the lady for the car (which again, she refused).
I think this disposable era for many cars is a fundamental part of what makes them so cherished later on: you have way too many people out there with lots of happy memories of these cars, and once there’s very few left and those people have disposable income, the prices will shoot up for the remaining examples out there.
Thus goes the cycle of car value. Sometime around 20 years after the end of manufacturing, the great vehicles reverse course on depreciation and start appreciating. As the owner of a 1990 Jeep MJ and a 1999 BMW e36 M3, I’m acutely aware of the increase in value these cars have. Luckily my e36 is a beat up car with 207k miles, I daily it, autocross it, and winter beat on it. My Comanche is a fair bit nicer, even though it is at 271k miles, it looks fantastic and I keep it nice, it works in the salt free months, but as soon as the snow flies it gets parked to preserve it’s rareness.
Gone may be the cheap XJs but now we have cheap compliance BEVs.
Man, I was just a tad late to the party that ended in SoCal a good 5 years or so early due to a burgeoning desert culture – by the time I finally put the dirt bike and quad away in the early 2010s to join my XJ friends it was already near impossible to find anything that wasn’t a total heap for less than $7-8k. So I ended up as the one ZJ guy in the crew and still had fun bashing the crap out of my (more capable and comfortable in many ways) toy for nearly a decade.
Now just waiting for my daughter to decide she’s ready for her own car before I take back my extremely-long-term-loan GX470 and prep it for more thrashing…
The cheap trail beaters still exist in the southern and western states where repeated freeze-thaw cycles are rare and the roads don’t see repeated brine baths. For $1400 in Colorado you can still buy that $1400 high-mileage, somewhat rusty, reverse Saudi Arabia XJ on Marketplace right now. The ones that have really shot up are (a) low-mileage, OEM, unmolested examples and (b) any 2D model that has a valid title and isn’t cut up or trashed.
This article could be written about a bunch of different vehicles. In my world – low-budget road racing, autocrossing and street shenanigans – a few stars come immediately to mind. I’m talking about the Mk. 1 & 2 VW GTI. The NA and NB Miata. The Fox-body Mustang 5.0 liter. The E30 and E36 body BMWs. The 1988-91 Honda CRX and Civic Si. Even the humble Dodge/Plymouth neon, preferably with the ACR package. Each of these was once dirt cheap, easily available, and could be built into a nearly endless variety of super fun combinations. But alas, these cars are thin on the ground now. This makes my Gen-X soul sad. Older generations could say the same about a bunch of formerly-cheap-and-available 60’s and 70’s stuff. Sigh.
I hope everyone who has wrecked an XJ lives an achingly long life so they have plenty of time to regret their actions. We’ve literally run out of affordable street-legal trail rigs in my area because idiots with a lead foot are more effective than road salt in terms of killing cars.
Let the record state that the only Jeep XJ I ever junked had already been ran into a pole sideways and it was completely rusted out.
I’ve got a decade and change on you but I feel the same about A-body Mopars. In the early-mid 1990s, with the exception of a few rare big-block or 340 equiped cars, one could regularly find sub $500 or even “free if you can move it” listings for fairly solid Darts, Dusters, Scamps and Valiants. Heck I got my 67 Barracuda during that time for well less than a grand. Although at the time we were often a bit outcast in the broader Mopar community which already highly valued B and E-bodies, they were my gateway into cars and wrenching; and maybe with the exception of some 4 door cars you can’t touch a good one these days for anything close to that.
If I recall it wasn’t just the XJ getting full sent in the 90s, Suzuki Samurai’s/Sidekicks, S10 Blazers, basically any cheap 4×4 a high school kid could afford would spend the weekends getting beat to heck. It was a glorious time, and now everybody’s doing it with 4Runners so there’s that.
All the 3rd gen 4Runners in my area are sunken in various mud pits so people have moved on to rotted 2007-2009 Jeep Wranglers.
you can do all this and more in a side by side now. yeah they aren’t ‘cheap’ or ‘disposable’ but if you have a halfway decent credit rating you can get one for around 200 a month and you just have to trailer it to the playground.
The baddest SxS on earth isn’t 1/1000th as cool as a $500 XJ held together by duct tape and rust.
Just wondering if that Jeep XJ you bought has any rust prior to you owning/touching it? I’m seeing you in a super hero costume and called Rustman. Can turn any piece of metal into rust just by touching it. Of course rust colored tights highlights your rusty balls.
I feel you there regarding another ’80s icon. Back in 2008 I bought a running and driving 1987 BMW 325 sedan (E30) for $400. It wouldn’t pass smog but was otherwise in fine shape other than scorched clear coat. Today that same car would be easily $2500+.
That car got converted into my 24 Hours of Lemons racer. Part of the reason we chose it was because they were fun but almost disposable. Any self serve junkyard here in San Diego had at least 10 of them to pick parts from.
It ran its final race last weekend. I’ve decided to retire it because it’s getting too expensive to replace parts. I’ve been through at least 2 fenders, hoods, and front bumpers due to racing contact, and back in the day I could pick those up at Pick Your Part for like $30. Nowadays I’m paying $150+ and have to meet some dude from Facebook Marketplace 100 miles away for it.
Also, get off my lawn! *shakes fist*