As a diehard Jeep nut, I tend to get random texts from friends when they see a cool Jeep. Recently, I received a message recently from Autopian contributor and design-genius Carlos Ferreira showing a new Jeep Wrangler 4-door with its steering wheel on the right side. “Was just chatting with a gentleman parked next to me in a RHD Jeep Wrangler he bought new from a dealer. He said he had no idea why they had RHD jeeps but he got a decent discount,” Carlos wrote. “What the heck? He went into the dealership and decided to just drive on the other side of the car to save a few grand?” I thought.
This, I will admit, is a bit of a basic post, but hey, they can’t all be deep-dives. Did you know that Jeep still offers right-hand drive Wranglers for the U.S. Market? In fact, Jeep has been selling right-hand-drive Wranglers since the 2003 market launch of the Jeep Wrangler “Postal Unit” based on the Jeep Wrangler TJ.
Here’s a look at one for sale on Facebook Marketplace:
The JK followed, with right-hand drive offered only for two-door. Here’s a dirt-cheap, 300,000-mile one for sale on Cargurus — under $6000!:
By 2009, Jeep stopped offering the RHD two-door Wrangler, instead only offering four-doors. This, I would argue, is the first truly decent Jeep Wrangler postal vehicle, because let’s be honest: The tiny two-door rural mail carriers before were lacking in interior volume, as should be obvious by the huge box on the back of the white TJ shown above. Here’s a four-door 2009 Wrangler for sale on Facebook:
Still to this day, you can buy a Wrangler RHD like the one Carlos saw in that parking lot:
Here’s one for sale at Lake Elsinore Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram:
Of course, the TJ wasn’t the first postal Jeep ever, it was just the first Wrangler. The distinction of “first Postal Jeep” belongs to the CJ-3A-based DJ-3A “Dispatcher,” a two-wheel drive vehicle that hit the scene in 1955, and by the time it left the market in 1965, was the very last vehicle in the U.S. to use the Go-Devil that had become so legendary during WWII after being developed in the late 1930s.
After the DJ-3A came the DJ-5, and you know I have a special place in my heart for that vehicle:
One Jeep I think doesn’t get enough love is the one I like to consider the first truly useful Postal Jeep in that it wasn’t so dang short like the early DJs — the Alaskan CJ-8 USPS Jeep:
They’re fascinating machines, and I think it’s great that Jeep still sells the modern Wrangler in a right-hand drive configuration. Though I used to love my old DJ, that was just my fun car; would I want a right-hand drive vehicle as my daily driver? Probably not, if only because of drive-through annoyances. But I’m a cheap bastard, so enough of a discount could get me to change my mind. But how much of a discount… hmm.
I don’t care at all about it being RHD, honestly, but I’d want a discount due to it being a Jeep.
My mom drove a right hand drive Cherokee when she delivered mail. She saw an advertisement in one the postal worker (maybe the union one?) magazines for a dealership in Chicago that had them in stock. So she went down there and got one.
I’ve driven a load of LHD cars over here, where we drive in the right just in case we need to get a sword out while riding a horse. It’s pretty much a non-issue, especially with a huge LHD resale market just over the water.
I don’t use drive thrus much, so I guess I’d want 10% off for LHD? Unless it’s an E30 M3.
Top tip for when driving a car with the steering wheel on the wrong side: leave something in the passenger door pocket so when you inevitably get in the wrong side you can just say “found it” and walk round to the correct side with slightly less shame.
Will take quite a big discount to get me into any Jeep..
My Figaro is RHD, I don’t mind that at all and never really think about it, I just drive.
I’ve never even seen a rhd vehicle in real life, so I can’t speak for experience. But I think knowing it is “wrong” would annoy me to no end, and I would either selling it again (which would be hard) or changing it somehow.
Or I could move to Ireland. That would surely make sense because of a car!
There are quite a few Caribbean islands that have you drive on the wrong side of the road where RHD Jeeps would be just fine. I’d rather be in Grand Cayman than Ireland. 🙂
Or Australia, or New Zealand, or Japan?
Ireland is pretty nice though.
I think the only place my passport would work would be Ireland 🙂
I think that big box on the back is not for mail storage, but is an augmented rear crash crumple zone.
Any mail storage would be incidental.
I mean if they’re going to give a discount I won’t kick it out of bed but I don’t think I’d mind much either way.
I daily a white 99 XJ, about twice a month a see an older (maybe 1994?) white US postal service XJ in my area. Makes me happy every time.
I know a few rural carriers that are able to special order the rhd jeeps from time to time. As strange as it seems in some small towns anything other than the big three is still considered foreign and it can be hard to find someone to work on something “foreign” . You have to go into a bigger town or city. That plays a part in their decision to buy them. Plus image of someone working for the government in a very American European car.
I don’t see the point of owning one unless you are a rural mail carrier or jeep collector.
4×4 or AWD Kei vans are basically designed for the job. The few rural carriers I know that made the switch are so much happier with them. I’m actually surprised USPS doesn’t do something to get a big order cheap and allowed. But that would be too helpful for their employees.
Around here they all drive a Mercedes Metris with the eagle that is absolutely not a Reichsadler replacing the Benz star,
I don’t know why the eagle.
Allegly so people don’t get the wrong idea that the government is buying mercs very funny. They should have just gotten some one to make them unbranded grills. But those would probably have been Chinese. I haven’t seen the armored gov bmws that I know of yet. I think one of the points was to blend in. If it wasn’t for that I bet they would have done the same thing. Some kind of emblem replacement.
My son works for USPS in one of their vehicle service facilities and these things are a constant problem. He’s constantly replacing turbos and driver seat cushions (at $600 a shot). The new NGV – lol, that thing is an even bigger pile of crap…
I think the NGV was always going to be garbage. And merc parts are always going to be more then domestic of Asia.
Kei van was the answer they just didn’t want to admit it. I’m sure someone could have stood up us production for a large enough order.
At this point they would be better off buying slates panel vans. Then messing with NGV and mercs.
It’s the USPS logo.
Mr. Zip was such a better logo.
Him and Reddy Killowatt… I
I worked at a Sprinter/Metris dealer and we had kits to replace the grill, wheel, and rear emblems that just had “Sprinter” in red letters. Many of the trade folks didn’t want their customers to get the wrong impression if they wheeled up in something with a giant Mercedes star on the front.
Couldn’t they just put the Dodge goat head on the front?
The did on the early Dodge Sprinters, but the grille was a completely different design, no big circle in the middle. Dodge stopped selling Sprinters after the 2009 model year.
You’re damn right it’s the right hand drive.
Left is wrong, and right is right.
Two things.
1st , I’m pretty sure the city of Milwaukee, WI uses RHD 2-door Jeeps as their meter-maid mobiles.
2nd, while a true working Jeep is awesome and makes me feel proud to be an American, I still don’t understand how a Jeep Wrangler is the right tool for the job. When I think Wrangler I think compromised. Compromised in space, safety, comfort, cost, and MPG. Compromised for good reason: off road capability. But rural mail carriers don’t need off road capability, they need efficiency.
Idk, maybe I’m wrong. But the rural mail carrier Jeep never made sense to me. If we could import the Toyota JPN Taxi, that’d be perfect.
It’s weird, I’ve observed two things in doing this job, and doing it in a wrangler: it’s both a terrible vehicle for the job, and a fantastic one at the same time.
It’s not a high paying job to begin with, even if you have years and years on the job. You get a separate allowance in your pay for your car. Basically a dollar a mile is what you get to buy, fuel, and maintain your vehicle.
This largely works, but works out better for some.
My route is 50 miles, so pretty much 50 bucks a day. I burn 35 of that up in fuel in my jeep.
My route is REALLY rough, 1/3 is stop and go neighborhood stuff, 1/3rd rural highway, and 1/3 of it is one lane gravel road, covered in washouts, not well plowed in the winters, and a lot of mailboxes that require you to literally drop down into a ditch or climb up a ledge to service from your car. We had a sub try to do it in an AWD CRV on a rainy day and he got his ass kicked. Had 2 flats in one day, and ripped off a mudflap. In the wintertime a postal truck or metris van wouldn’t be able to do the route. Not to mention some of the utterly ridiculous driveways I go up to deliver packages.
And this isn’t the Yukon, this is friggin eastern Ohio.
Just up the road is a neighboring office with a route that spans 120 miles. It pays 120 bucks, and it’s almost all gorgeous smooth paved roads. The girl does it in a pristine 2017 Honda CRV with all season tires, and she burns maybe 30 bucks a day to do it. She also gets about 50-60 packages a day, compared to my 120-200.
More still, some of us are doing this in a Prius or a Chevy Bolt.
But for a lot of routes, You need something tall enough to run 10 ply tires, not get hung up in tight turn arounds in driveways, low enough to slide in and out of all day, able to plow through snowbanks to reach boxes when people don’t shovel, big enough to haul tons of packages, small enough to get reasonable mileage, reliable enough to not break every week, and when it does break, easy enough to find parts for so you can bang out a repair after work and make it back the next day. It also needs to be affordable to buy, new enough to get full coverage insurance on, and old enough to not cry about dogs jumping up to the window and scratching the hell out of the paint.
If I could wave a magic wand, I’d have a factory right hand drive AWD Toyota Sienna with that off road package they have, and somehow be able to afford it.
But I cant, so for me, the Jeep has been the best choice.
Great insight, thankful for you folks getting the mail delivered even when it’s not just to a mailbox in a cul-de-sac.
I love your post. I’m a retired postal worker. I was never a carrier but I heard enough stories like yours to keep me in processing. Thanks for what you do.
Oh no, thank YOU guys for always getting our stuff to us right 99.9 percent of the time. A flat tire or a bad battery cell might cost me a half hour of my day. If my mail showed up I sorted and mixed up, it would add 3 hours to my day with zero extra pay.
So thank you!
We were pretty good friends with our rural mail carrier when I was a kid and until I went to college 3000 miles away in the mid seventies, the carriers just drove regular sedans or maybe small pickups but always with a bench seat and usually an automatic. There was one older guy on another route that drove a standard three on the tree and wasn’t about to change. Now, with exception of used police cars driving a LHD car from the right seat looks pretty much impossible.
Does everyone get a 25 year old Japanese import now or what?
I was able to drive my stick shift VW Dasher from the right seat well enough to drive from a gas station to the interstate, get up to speed, and go to sleep letting the college girls who knew not of the clutch to drive a couple hundred miles.
But the dasher had the nearest suggestion of a bump, dividing the drivers foot well from the passenger side. Most new cars are like driving around in a golf bag. They’re not even pleasant from the drivers seat much less trying to rip out the center console which I’m sure is filled with “important stuff essential for making forward progress”
Even sports cars used to have unimpeded pedals. Why do people put up with this?
Anyway, I’m curious about the rural carriers that buy their own cars. The options seem bleak.
What I am interested to know is how the dealer manager or stock controller or whoever determines that a RHD Jeep in a LHD market makes sense. I’d be curious to know if Stellantis gave them a really good deal because for example Jeep is going through a rough patch here in Aus.
Someone custom ordered it and backed out of the deal. It sat until it aged out and they fire saled it to get it off the floorplan before it started costing them 500 a month to keep.
That’s what I was thinking. Someone ordered it, backed out, and the dealer got stuck with it and just wanted it gone.
Some of my biggest automotive regrets are not picking up cars like that – a super low mile Prius V that the salesman basically said “name a price and it’s yours” and a C/D/J/F dealer up in either McKean or Warren County, PA that got stuck with some Fiatas (for years…) and was firesaling them for basically nothing. The former got deep-sixed by my wife (couldn’t see out of the back window w/ the child seat in place) and the latter were so old that they couldn’t lease them anymore and I didn’t necessarily want to buy one for the long haul. Stupid, stupid me…
I was wondering if they’ve been having trouble shifting RHD export models because of tariffs, so they’re selling them in the US instead.
(In the UK Land Rovers are cheaper than Jeeps.)
The issue isn’t the RHD. The issue is it’s a modern Jeep with all the problems they come with.
I always thought they were cool
Trust me, they’re not discounted often
I’d say the only ones that are an actual deal are brand new ones, or ones that are just barely used, but still well into the $40,000 range. Because of the nature of the job (20 bucks an hour starting out, 50 to 100 a day to cover all of your vehicle expenses including fuel, and a job that by its nature requires you to beat the piss out of said vehicle all day every day)
Buying a new one is really only an option for carriers with a lot of years under their belt making closer to 35 an hour plus.
So that leaves the rest of us fighting over the privilege of spending a large chunk of our income to purchase and maintain either a 25 year old imported Japanese vehicle, buying a factory left hand drive vehicle and converting it, or buying a Chrysler product that has spent its entire life doing stop-and-go driving 6 days a week for hundreds of thousands of miles.
My current mail Jeep is a 2015 JK 4 door RHD, I bought it with 170,000 miles on it. I drove 6 hours to New York to get it, and paid $14 grand. It was the best option I could find for the money.
One year later, it is mechanically totalled, has 210,000 miles, looks like hell, and I still owe somewhere around 7500 on the loan.
But hey, she fires up and runs every day!
All that being said, if you find a great deal on one, don’t let the RHD scare you off! The only different parts are mostly limited to the steering linkage, pumps, lines, and brackets, and there is no shortage of parts. As for driving them, you get used to it in 15 minutes, and I swear it even gives you a weird advantage off road! It’s fun to see other lines that nobody seems to notice from the other side of a car.
One of the pluses I found was off the job, I wasn’t tempted to impulsively stop (RHD Subie Legacy) at fast food drivethrus. Otherwise you get used to driving from the “wrong” side pretty quickly. Tollbooths and keypad electric gates were definitely annoyances though.
But yeah, RHD vehicles that delivered mail usually work very hard.
Duuuuuuude that’s one of my favorite things. Backing up to a drive through window never gets old. People get a kick out of it.
And I would KILL to have a JDM car to do this job in, but my route is 2 trips a day loaded floor to ceiling with packages in a jeep. Even a CRV doesn’t have enough room for my route 🙁
French toll booths in a UK car can be a pain*. I usually just get out and walk round the car if I don’t have a passenger.
*(possibly intentionally knowing the French)
My ’62 IH Scout was RHD. I only ever drove it once around the block. My ulterior motive for buying a RHD Scout was to salvage the left side window regulator out of it for my ’63. An $850 Scout netted me a $350 regulator right off the trailer!
One of the posties in my area has a RHD Subaru, there’s some other RHDs but they’re all Chrysler/Jeep products. Most of our posties just drive on the wrong side of the road.
Good for the US Virgin Islands, and also anyone else that wants that rad JDM street cred yo LOL
It was even available in Tuscadero pink when that color was available. I really hope some of the 30k Tuscaderos are RHD 😀
But if I wanted RHD I could depend on for postal use or other shit, I’d buy a Yaris Verso from the UK (RHD and speedo in mph)
There is no discount hat would get me to accept the issues of right wheel steering and owning a Jeep at the same time.
That’s misery x misery. Misery ^ 2! Who would accept misery squared?
Those of us who work for the postal service.
It’s misery x3 if you’re a fussybutt.
If you like an adventure and for every single day to feel like you’re flipping the bird to fate, death, common sense, and the entire internet’s perception of Jeep reliability, it’s not misery. It’s the best job in the damn world!
I’m interested to read that posties have to buy their own vehicle. It sort of makes sense but seems weird if US Postal service is a gov entity
Not on all routes, only rural offices that do not have enough govt. vehicles to go around.
10 miles down the road from mine is an office that has 9 routes, but 3 govt. trucks. The city carriers use those, rurals all drive thier own USDM Honda CRV’s.
10 miles the other way is Steubenville Oh that has like 10 Metris Vans and a half Dozen LLVs. Nobody there uses thier own vehicle at all.
Our office is a bunch of maniacs, we have three routes and we all drive jeeps because (I SWEAR) they’re the only thing that actually lasts AND can haul all the packages we get
Cause that’s my fun car.
Sometimes it even runs car, (Ooh-oh).
125% LH or RHD.
Not a jeep guy. Did two 550 mile one way ski trips to Lake Louise AB in December and February crammed into a Suzuki Jeep and a CJ. Never ever again!
speaking of wacky Jeeps, did you know there was a production Jeep called the CJ4? it was an extended wheelbase CJ3 made by Mahindra!
https://mahindramuseum.in/2021/06/13/cj-4/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmyKSR7qmDM
this video is an incredibly good watch if you wanna know more about M&M
Almost all of my driving is on a two lane highway. Most of it is littered with RVs, tour buses, and people driving rental cars hoping to see a moose/bear/caribou. Try to pass a vehicle while assessing oncoming traffic from the passenger seat.
To answer the question of how much of a discount would I require to buy a RHD vehicle? I’d say 85 – 90% dicount, or what I would call parts car.
Back in the late 70’s/early 80’s, my uncle had a bronco rigged with two steering wheels connected by an accessory belt (watch those fingers, kids) and duplicate pedals connected by a custom linkage. He used it for rural mail delivery and driver’s ed. I was able to “drive” before I could even reach the pedals. Good times.
The XJ also had an RHD postal Jeep configuration for the era between the CJ/DJ and the TJ.
Every so often my local mail delivery person still delivers in a very nice right hand drive Cherokee County in dark green with gold basket weave wheels.
They’re getting to be rare gems. A lot of us want them, but nobody will insure them for full coverage anymore due to age. The ones out there that are still really nice are mostly backup jeeps.
I had the exact one you’re describing, dark green, gold wheels, gorgeous leather interior, not a freaking scratch on it. I managed to roll it down a hill attempting to service a mailbox in a bad storm.
Just like that, the prettiest little XJ I’ve ever had was gone.
So you have to pay 5 grand for a VERY ROUGH example or 10-15k for a nice one, that you have to drive and work hard every day, and if some butthole slams into you and totals it, your just out of luck.
These are typically mail vehicles and there is no discount, they will cost you more. Contract mail carriers get preyed upon by one right hand drive dealer in particular, I can’t recall the name now.
Instead of a Discount, you can just drop it and put it on Watanabes and I’ll be all over it.