Category: Large 4x4s 
Price Range: £20,095 to £24,595
Excellent off-road ability, plenty of kit, bold styling.
Poor handling, plasticky cabin, expensive to run.
Great off-road, poor on it. There are better, cheaper 4x4s that have better all-round abilities.
It's not the most comfortable place in which to sit. Although the seats can be moved forwards and backwards electronically, the seat backs can only be adjusted manually. The steering only adjusts for height and all this means that it's very hard to get comfortable and it requires quite a bit of huffing and puffing to get a half-decent driving position. You invariably find yourself close to the steering wheel but too far away from the pedals. There is little room in the footwell and the door storage cubbies hem you in. It's a large car but it doesn't feel at all spacious in the front seats.
Rear-seat leg space, though, is much better and the mechanism for laying the seats flat to create a larger, flat loading bay is very simple to use. You just pull a couple of straps and they fold down nicely. Also, you don't have to waste time trying to get the seatbelts out of the way because they are positioned well away from the seats. There's also a split tailgate which means you can put the window up and the tailgate down.
It's still pretty well kitted out. Leather seats and leather-trimmed interior, rear parking sensors, tyre pressure monitoring, hill descent control and hill start assist and 18" alloys are all standard items. If you like, you can have a vinyl-type electronically-operated sliding roof, which is nice, but you'll pay £950 extra for that. The £1,500 all-singing, all dancing infotainment system with voice recognition, sat nav and Bluetooth is extremely user-friendly and worth the extra cost.
Latest Readers' Drives About the Jeep Cherokee
wrote on 19 07 2006