From the 2011 New York Auto Show, Cars.com's Kelsey Mays takes a look at the 2012 Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8.
Transcript
<v Announcer>Cars.com auto review. Hi, I'm Kelsey Mays for cars.com. The Jeep Grand Cherokee was redesigned for the 2011 model year. And now we're at the New York International Auto Show Checking out an SRT8 high performance version of that SUV.
Now this car has more power, better highway gas mileage, and Jeep says it's the best handling SUV the brand has created ever. Let's check out why. Now most vehicles from Chrysler's SRT group look different to signal kind of their racing capabilities. The Grand Cherokee, no different story here. It sits about one inch lower than the regular Grand Cherokee and SRT8 form. You can see the front bumper has been completely redesigned here. It's got this cool piano black insert here. Same with these portals up here. If you move around to the side, the wheels measure 20 inches around, somewhat modest for an SUV this size, but upfront, they have massive 15 inch disc brakes with six piston Brembo calipers. Those are huge breaks. That's as big as the entire wheel on some subcompact cars. Now to the good stuff. Under this hood is a 6.4 liter hemi V8, makes an estimated 465 horsepower, 465 pounds feet of torque with the SRT8 standard all wheel drive system, gets this thing to 60 miles an hour in just 4.8 seconds, Jeep says. Pretty good when you consider this thing weighs more than 5,000 pounds and the regular V8, the 5.7 liter Grand Cherokee takes nearly three seconds longer. Changes inside include a new flat bottom steering wheel with paddle shifters here for the automatic transmission. The seats also have thicker side bolsters and a suede insert in the center to keep you held tight in corners. Jeep says the old Grand Cherokee SRT8 got them complaints that the seats were too narrow and pinched people around. So these seats are actually intentionally wider. Now the adaptive suspension, it's got a new track mode that goes to the left of sport mode, actually helps divert about two thirds of the power from the all wheel drive system to the rear wheels and helps the grand Cherokee SRT8 pull a sports car like 0.9 Gs on the skid pad. Jeep says highway fuel economy will be up about 13% versus the old Grand Cherokee SRT8 which means this could get, wait for it, 18 miles per gallon highway. That's okay. I'm thinking that gas mileage was not anywhere in the top 500 reasons you wanted to get a Grand Cherokee SRT8, check it out though. Hits Jeep dealerships late this summer. <v Announcer>For more car related news, go to cars.com or our blog kickingtires.net.
