2022 Jeep Grand Wagoneer Review: The Grand Debate

Design | Comfort | Technology | Performance | Safety | Fuel Economy | Pricing | FAQ

Big, posh SUVs are long-lived, with the successful nameplates of the species largely having killed off the pretenders ages ago. So when a new competitor crops up to face established names like — well let’s face it, this is basically the Cadillac Escalade class — we’re all pretty interested. And when the competitor revives a name from the history books like the Jeep Grand Wagoneer, interest and scrutiny get even more intense. As does scoring scrutiny for our star ratings.

If you watched Clint Simone’s excellent video review above (and you should) and are now ready to read my prose below (great idea), you’re going to notice a few differences of opinion. That’s ok. Here’s a dirty secret, dear reader, we argue about cars all the time. Hell, we love it.

So, for this review, I’m going to call special attention to the areas where I had a different take than both our First Drive of the Grand Wagoneer and the recent video review. In the end, we all agree on more than we don’t, but it’s a useful exercise to think through where our scores diverge. Especially with a vehicle so new, and important to many enthusiasts and SUV shoppers.

A vehicle’s verdict is relative only to its own segment and not the new-vehicle market as a whole. For more on how Motor1.com rates cars, click here.

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Unfortunately the big, blocky exterior of the Grand Wagoneer is a lot less subtle and far less pretty. The Jeep is less slab sided than it is flab sided, with the bodyside of the vehicle ballooning away from the glasshouse in a sort of squared-off paunch. The strange shapes of the windows are highlighted in oddly tacky chrome, and the whole package seems utterly reliant on gigantic wheels to give it any cool factor.

• Seating Capacity: 7
• Seating Configuration: 2 / 2 / 3
• Cargo Capacity: 94.2 Cubic Feet

Overall ride comfort is where I diverged the most from our original scoring of the Grand Wagoneer. My fellow editors found the ride quality to be borderline unacceptable for this class of premium SUV. After putting over 2,000 miles on my test vehicle – driving over a huge diversity of terrain on a trip from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to a rural part of Maine in the White Mountains – I can’t agree.

In our First Drive of the Jeep, Brandon Turkus had this to say about the ride:

“Bigger bumps reverberate through the body while low-amplitude hits still send an unpleasant shudder directly to your backside. It’d be a catastrophe on rough roads were the steering not so well isolated.”

That simply wasn’t my experience at all. The roads don’t get much rougher in and around rural Maine, where there isn’t a flat piece of land on which to pave a strip of asphalt, and where weather conditions are perfect for developing frost heaves. Still, even riding on big, 22-inch wheels, I found the air suspension soaked up the worst of any uneven surfaces I encountered. So what gives?

The Grand Wagoneer doesn’t “waft,” it’s true. I suspect that this particular difference of opinion comes down to expectation. I anticipated the ride quality of the big SUV to be good enough that it simply wasn’t distracting, especially as the miles added up. My fellow editors were hoping to be spoiled with the kind of magic carpet ride that often comes with six-figure price tags and is seemingly standard equipment on the Escalade. Certainly driving across the country with a 2-year-old and an infant, one’s tolerance for small annoyances increases almost immediately.

One more note on the driving with kids front: While the Jeep’s cabin is spacious, don’t expect to use it as a minivan. The large and protruding touchscreen for rear-seat climate controls was a huge pain in the ass when combined with a couple of car seats. Despite there being loads of leg and head room in the second row (and the third), doing any kind of “east-west” maneuvering is almost impossible because of the jutting screen.

My wife was ready to crack the damn thing off as we entered hour 30 of driving, but your results, especially with older kids or no kids at all, will certainly vary.

Oh, in the meantime, I found the massaging front seats to be the best I’ve ever encountered in a car, period. It’s fair to say that I might have missed a few competitors over the last couple of years, but I’m more than happy to put in the research to validate my claim.

• Center Display: 12.0-Inch Touchscreen
• Front Passenger Display: 10.3-Inch Touchscreen
• Wireless Apple CarPlay or Android Auto: Yes

If you absolutely, positively, simply must have all of the screen real estate, look no further. A swath of highly resolved pixels runs across the front of the cabin like manifest destiny for the digital revolution. In the back, beautiful, twinned 12.0-inch touchscreen displays (a $1,995 option) stand at the ready to entertain second-row occupants for hours.

Leave your wires at home, Jeep tells me. The charging pad would keep my iPhone topped up while it wirelessly connected via CarPlay (or Android Auto if you’re a contrarian) to the head unit. And I was excited to hear that whoever was sitting shotgun would be able to keep the toddler occupied by mirroring our tablet to the rear screen. Technological perfection, right?

Not exactly. While I’m still very comfortable giving the Grand Wagoneer a 9 out of 10 for the potential of all this tech, in the torture chamber of traveling with kids it didn’t always hold up. Or, at least, the system proved to be very dependent on your own home ecosystem of devices and media.

Here’s a big one: Screen mirroring in the Jeep doesn’t support Apple products. That’s a bigger issue for folks with small children, who aren’t able to navigate the rear seat entertainment options all on their own. Turning on Finding Nemo on the iPad would’ve kept toddler Jack happy for hours (the kid could watch that movie 20 times in a row), while keeping Dad or Mom in control of the display.

No worries. Media can also be fed into the various screens by way of an old fashioned HDMI cable. Except, it didn’t work (or didn’t work easily).

Knowing that much of our drive route would be through mountainous areas with spotty wifi coverage (so no streaming), I grabbed an HDMI to Lightning adapter so we could play downloaded movies for the kid. I tested this out on my iPhone 13 with the Disney+ app, and it worked great. However, when we attempted to use the same setup with the cord going to our iPad, all we got was a black screen. Weird.

Now, if you’re not an Apple family. Or able to regularly use the very handy baked-in streaming apps in the Uconnect 5 system, you’ll be just fine. But bear in mind there’s a ton of complexity in this Jeep’s digital offering, and be sure you know how to use your critical devices before you drive off the lot.

One quick nota bene on the tow rating here, too. Currently our star rating system isn’t flexible enough to incorporate towing prowess in the final score, or here in the Performance section where it belongs for trucks and big SUVs (we’re working on it). With that said, the Grand Wagoneer’s maximum towing capacity of 9,850 pounds (when properly equipped) outguns the Escalade’s max of 8,200 significantly.

I found the drowsy driver assist and the night vision system slightly less useful over the course of my week-plus-long loan. The drowsy driver bit certainly works, lighting up the cabin with a chime if your wheel crosses a lane line somewhere. But with a big vehicle on narrow roads there were dozens of times when I found myself yelling at the dash “I did that on purpose!” As for the night vision, I’ve just never understood how I’m supposed to use this feature when it’s only visible in the instrument cluster… Surely it’s safer to not look away from the road in the pitch black?

The good news/bad news here is pretty straightforward. Bad news: with a rating of 13 miles per gallon in the city and 18 on the highway, the Grand Wagoneer is just as thirsty as you’d expect and less efficient than trucks from Cadillac and Lincoln. Good news: Even when averaging speeds well above the posted limits on turnpikes and interstates throughout Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, I was observing just a tick under 17 mpg on the highway.

Here we go. Yes, the very idea of a six-figure Jeep kind of blows people out of the water. But this is an expensive vehicle segment (and getting more expensive all the time), and it’s important that we’re comparing fully loaded apples to fully loaded apples.