New Zealand’s summer is so wet that 1000 tourists have been stranded by road blockages, rain is falling at up to 40mm per hour, the Met Office says “small tornadoes are possible” and, earlier today, while driving along a road in a Jeep Gladiator, I was overtaken by a speed boat in the other lane.
Now it’s, well, I don’t know what time exactly but gone midnight in a basement bar in Queenstown, on New Zealand’s South Island. It’s loud and dark but Jeep’s global president and the company’s star exterior designer are still here. Both have just spent two days getting soaked to the skin and are ready for several more. Pick a car company boss and a chief designer: can you picture them in a pub talking about making a pure-electric adventure truck, having already spent half a week up to their ankles in mud?
Jeep talks about ‘authenticity’ in the same way everybody who wants to make serious 4x4s talks about authenticity. The difference is that it’s not just a few engineers and some in-house or drafted-in experts who live it.
The Gladiator’s designer is Taylor Langhals; bearded, relaxed, 30, the fourth generation of his family to work at Jeep. He’s wanted this job since he was a kid. And the Gladiator – Jeep’s first pick-up for 27 years – is special to him.
That there are faux imprints of a dirt bike tyre moulded into the head of the load bay and that the Jeep factory’s zipcode (in Toledo, Ohio) is stamped just inside the tailgate might seem twee. But don’t be in doubt about how senior Jeep people use these vehicles. The tailgate opening hatch measures 1270mm across because that will accommodate the widest snowmobile you can buy. “And that’s the one I have,” says Langhals.
Snowmobiles, dirt bikes, mountain bikes, fishing gear, camping gear, outdoor stuff, pulling boats: that’s the point of the Gladiator. Given how frequently Jeeps are used, abused and modified in the US (“let’s be honest: Wranglers stay stock for about five minutes”), it’s about time Jeep had a pick-up again.
It made one as long ago as 1947 and first introduced the Gladiator name in 1962. A pick-up stayed on sale, latterly as the Jeep Comanche, which looks like an aftermarket hack job of an XJ-series Cherokee, until 1992. But since then, there hasn’t been a pick-up Jeep, which seems like an odd oversight given the kind of use Wranglers get in a country where pick-ups are some of the best-selling, and certainly the most profitable, vehicles.
The Gladiator isn’t a workhorse or commercial vehicle, though. It’s a fun wagon. Its payload is 620kg rather than 1000kg-plus – despite having a rear axle from a Dodge Ram – and its towing weight is 2721kg.
It’s what Americans consider a mid-size and what we think of as a big truck, at around 5.5m, the length of a Volkswagen Amarok and Ford Ranger. Think of it as a Ranger Raptor rival if it comes to the UK (still in question), where it would have a 3.0 diesel. In the US, and here in New Zealand, there’s a 285bhp 3.6 V6 mated to an eight-speed automatic. EVs and plug-in hybrids are coming, Jeep president Christian Meunier assures us. Given the high current fleet CO2 average of Jeep owner Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, they’ll have to. But with that come advantages, too. Think of heading softly down a track, roof down, making no noise to alarm the wildlife. Think of setting up camp and having the electrical power you brought with you. Think of the advantage of being able to dole out precisely how much torque each wheel’s grip can handle, with instant response. Meunier says the firm will use electrical power to make Jeeps “more capable than ever”.
Personally, I’d love to see the return of a forward control Jeep, too, but flat windscreens are out these days, because while they can be made aerodynamically efficient (and while with a pure-electric powertrain that wouldn’t matter so much anyway), pedestrians don’t respond well to impacts with them.
Like all big pick-ups, the Gladiator is a separate-chassis off-roader. Here, though, that chassis is very obviously, given the size and shape of the front half, from a Jeep Wrangler – another Langhals design.
Jeep has managed and curated the Wrangler through its incarnations with the kind of care that has kept it relevant and incredibly successful. It helps, I suppose, that Americans live the lifestyle and have the space and access to enjoy it that most of us in Europe can only imagine. But still, getting it right enables Jeep to sell a quarter of a million Wranglers a year, while Mercedes sells less than a tenth as many G-Classes and Land Rover has sold no Defenders since 2016.
For the Gladiator, the Wrangler’s frame has been extended by a fairly whopping 780mm, with 490mm of that in the wheelbase and the rest behind the rear axle. It’s neither a cheap nor easy car to assemble, says Meunier, formerly of Infiniti and who has headed Jeep since April last year, joining just in time for Jeep’s annual jamboree in the Sierra Nevada mountains.