Not So Great (Car and) Drivers

I’m sorry but I just couldn’t help but laugh out loud over Car and Driver’s new review of the 4 door wrangler. I drove the same vehicle over the same stretch of trail and it seems I had MUCH fewer troubles than they did. Just read this:

“We bump down the Rubicon’s boulder-filled Big Sluice section with the grace of an overturned Porta Potti. We’re getting good at identifying the percussion of abuse from underneath. A metallic shriek is a dragging suspension-link bracket, and a crinkling noise like tinfoil being unrolled is the exhaust can getting squashed. A sudden pounding jolt means a frame member has been clouted, and a long, deep scratching scrape that sounds like a Lexus being dragged upside down is in fact the Wrangler’s skid plate doing its duty.

Note their handiwork on the front bumper too. Damn guys, to smash that part up is ridiculous since the object would have been in FRONT of you. Then again, it looks like they’re taking the psycho route through that pass anyway. Seeing how badly you can mash up your Jeep on a trail is not the point of any off road trip. The crushed corner is probably from them trying to create poser photo-op like this picture below.

Here’s more:

“By the time we reached pavement on the Rubicon, the Unlimited was haggard and shedding plastic trim. Did the rocks win? We’ll call it a tie. The Unlimited drove everywhere Dubey and Coffman carefully directed it but left paint and metal shards in its wake as it wriggled up the trail, at times like a size-12 foot squeezing into a size-11 shoe.”

I’m sorry guys but either you’re not watching the spotters show you the right line or you suck at driving off road and can only handle oval test tracks. Jeez. In my group, not one vehicle ended up with scratches on the doors and broken suspension link brackets. I can’t speak for the Jeep Jamboree or Jeep folks there but they must have been laughing up a storm around the campfire later that night because of such assy driving from Car and Driver big shots.