Lessons Learned in the 2016 Jeep Cherokee Trailhawk

By Derek Shiekhi - February 4, 2016

Some people find clarity through yoga. Others find it in a cloud of marijuana smoke. Then there are those who see things more clearly when they’re out in the grandeur of nature. It was there, behind the wheel of the 2016 Jeep Cherokee Trailhawk, that I had several epiphanies.

-You don’t have to go across the world for an adventure.

Sure, scuba diving off the coast of Australia or blasting down the Autobahn in Germany sounds like a hoot and a half. However, I only had to drive an hour or so with my father and his girlfriend Sylvia from Round Rock, Texas to reach a Marble Falls OHV park, a land where you can climb peaks to breath-taking views devoid of traffic lights and splash through the best kind of mud – the kind that’s not being slung by presidential candidates.

-A DeLorean isn’t the only automotive time machine.

On the way out to the park, to a soundtrack of noticeable but tolerable noise from the Firestone Destination A/T tires, I took the Trailhawk through the straightaways of city streets and the curves of country roads. Its optional 3.2-liter Pentastar V6’s 271 horsepower and 239 pound-feet of torque were most present above 3,000 rpm. By the end of the journey, the Trailhawk had taken me in a mental semi-circle, back to my childhood. I remembered taking a road trip in an XJ Cherokee through small Texas towns to see the sights with my parents and my brother. I was probably eight or 10 years old, with no idea of what a Cherokee really was. Rounding the other half of the circle left me back in late 2015, soon about to find out.

-You’re never too young to teach or too old to learn something new.
Even though I’m now in my 30s and have my own place and career, I’ll never stop being my father’s son. He’s the man who instilled a love of automobiles in me and taught me how to change my own oil. That day in the OHV park, I was going to show him and his girlfriend, both in their 50s, the off-road prowess of Jeep’s reincarnated icon.

Sylvia’s gasps at how beautifully the carpet of rich green trees laid over the undulating landscape and under the pure and cloudless light blue sky gave way to squeals of nervous excitement at the sight of the terrain we were about to cross. At the bottom of a particularly steep and gnarly uphill stretch of rock that had been disfigured by the hands of time, I felt the same energy – without the fear. I had plenty of helpful buttons in front of me and a one-inch lift and skid plates underneath. Selec-Terrain traction control system in Rock mode? Yes. Low range engaged? Check. Rear locker fired up? Hell yeah. Let’s go. We certainly did – straight up. I could’ve used the handy Selec-Speed Control, but I just made the ascent the old-fashion way with my right foot. Later, both my dad and Sylvia marveled at the effectiveness of the system’s ability to keep us at a steady speed as we made our way down from a vertigo-triggering peak.

-Liabilities can be more limiting than capabilities.

There was one point in our adventure at which we entered a narrow passage lined on both sides with tree branch fingernails capable of digging into the Trailhawk’s paint and rock outcroppings eternally ready to generate sheet metal shrieks and fears of Jeep blackballing me for disfiguring its off-pavement panda. My dad and Sylvia and I reached a portion of slick muddy rocks which seemed unphased no matter how many buttons I pushed. If we had had more room on the sides, I could’ve wiggled the Trailhawk around, repositioned it for a better line of attack, and powered forward. Ultimately, the physical threats to the $40,000 Jeep that wasn’t mine and to my career convinced me it was a better idea to reverse and head back the way we had come.

-The JK isn’t the only Jeep with Wrangler DNA.

Although the Cherokee is car-based, like the Wrangler, it took me up, down, and (mostly) through formidable areas of the picturesque Texas Hill Country. The Trailhawk also rode roughly like the Wrangler, but whereas the JK’s suspension was stiff enough to shake five-gallon buckets of paint, the KL was better suited for preparing 007-style martinis.

-Your past doesn’t have to be your future.

Just as my modern Cherokee experience was very different from the one I remember from my youth, the Trailhawk’s nine-speed gearbox was unlike the one I tested in the 2014 Cherokee Latitude. It was much more easygoing that it used to be. Jeep’s tuning and tweaks have paid off.

-History is made one person at a time.

One reason the XJ Cherokee became the legend it is now is that one by one, people drove it. They got it dirty. They found out what it could do off-road. They made life-long memories in it, just as two very important people in my life did with me in the 2016 Jeep Cherokee Trailhawk.

*My Bright White 2016 Jeep Cherokee Trailhawk media review vehicle had an as-tested price of $40,200, which included a $995 destination charge and several options. Some of those included the $1,045 SafetyTec Group with parking sensors and blind spot monitoring; the $1,695 Comfort/Convenience Group with features such as Keyless Enter-N-Go, a power liftgate, and a remote starting system; the $1,745 3.2-liter V6 with stop/start functionality; the $1,495 Leather Interior Group with heated front seats and a heated steering wheel; the $895 Ventilated/Memory Seat Group with leather seats (ventilated up front) and memory settings for the radio, driver’s seat, and exterior mirrors; and the $845 Uconnect/8.4-inch touchscreen/GPS/HD Radio combo.