On Wheels: The Jeep Renegade, a rebel only on the pavement - Washington Post
At 29 miles per gallon on the highway, using regular-grade gasoline at a cost still below $2. 50 a gallon in many U. S. communities, the stylish 2015 Jeep Renegade 4x4 Limited will provide much fodder for conversation. Renegade buyers aren’t Jeep Heavy people. The Jeep Heavy crowd — devotees of models such as the Wrangler and the Rubicon — probably would not even consider a Renegade for their personal use. They know what Jeep’s U. S. and European marketers know — the Renegade is a code-named rebel against Jeep’s rugged, but fuel-consumptive, body-on-frame build tradition. The Renegade is one of the latest children of a corporate marriage of convenience — between a bankrupt Chrysler Corp. The merged company now operates under the name Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. The Renegade — largely based on the Fiat 500X reviewed in this column last week and 62-percent sourced from Melfi, Italy — is far more Fiat than Jeep. That is likely to be offensive to Jeep chauvinists, whose spiritual home for all things “real Jeep” — their term, not mine — remains in the bowels of the Toledo South Assembly Plant, the Ohio factory that built the original Jeep CJ, the workhorse... Well, he wasn’t an emperor — just the chairman of Chrysler, which he used to buy American Motors. Source: www.washingtonpost.com
