The term most has to imply exceptions, and it's those exceptions (both Jap and German) that I have owned and driven HARD. Never have I been so nervous behind the wheel as I have been with my TJR though. I also do not know that the feedback here would accurately reflect the mass majority of overall Jeep reliability experiences. Most here seem to have positive experiences to report, but at the same time - I couldn't guess how many folks here have actually owned a reliable Yota to compare to in terms of maintenance and TCO.
All vehicles have personalities and can be uniquely reliable — or just complete dog shit by design (such as the 1980 VW Scirocco and 2000 Audi S5 I owned, all things VAG just SUCK).
If anyone here has been around long enough to own something that is an uphill battle to maintain from the onset, then you can feel my pain with this TJR. Murphy's law seems to follow this vehicle, and I thought I was getting into a "platform" that I could actually wheel, but JFC.
The problem is for a ~105K vehicle, it feels in many ways like 200K+ already. It had 92K and change when I bought it. Although it wasn't perfect, I never got the sense that it would be the disaster on wheels that it has been. I had spent over 3 months looking at Jeeps before I landed on this one. I saw a lot of junk projects, and many (most of the rest) weren't pretending to be running well. This one stood out from the pack and I bought it.
I never felt that it would leave me stranded until it did. A few weeks after I had replaced the head and finally wrangled my steering setup - I thought that things were finally looking up, but my god - there does not seem to be any end in sight to the problems or design flaws that my OCD will not let me just ignore.
I do not baby this Jeep, but I cannot in good faith wheel it like it's marketed to wheel. I do not see it being a daily driver without significant ongoing maintenance, and parts aren't anywhere near as abundant as they are for Toyota's (even those over a decade OLDER than my 05).
I don't know what else to say, there's just some bad juju. Maybe I'm too hard on it, maybe the Chrysler union folks were getting ready to strike the day they started putting mine together, I can't exactly say. Some of those fiddle bits that fail on these seem to be the difference from getting back home safe and sound.... or hiking on foot 75 miles back down a maze of NF roads with my 10yr old daughter, back towards civilization for a tow truck
With all of that said, the problem. The mother of all f**king problems that I have with this Jeep is that I still love it. I already have a ton of history with it, made more sacrifices than I should have, hell - my hands are TOAST from a bunch of work that I recently did to it, but I can look down at this giant blood blister under my thumb nail and all that I can think about is when is this going to heal so I can finish doing X, Y, Z to it LOL.
It's a sickness.
