In 2015, automotive journalist Pablo González got a Jeep Renegade to lock its brakes so hard the rear wheels lifted off the ground. Jeep told him that car was broken, and he wasn’t able to repeat the problem with other Renegades. But now it’s starting to look like the issue might not be so isolated.
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On Spanish the car site km77.com, González recounts his experience with the brakes in an early-build 1.6-liter, front-wheel drive 2015 Jeep Renegade. Translated from Spanish:
“The body leaned forward, nothing strange, it was expected. But [it] continued to lean and reached a point where the sky disappeared from my horizon. All I saw was asphalt and asphalt, moving quickly before my eyes. Despite this I kept stepping on the pedal with all my strength. I had the feeling that the rear wheels were in the air, which surprised me to not feel any blow when they returned to [the ground.] I stopped the car and I was thinking, puzzled, if what he had felt was true.”
So he set up a couple cameras and repeated the experiment. Turns out, yeah, the rear end was coming off the ground. A lot.
González writes that he reached out to Fiat Group Spain, and he said the division had technicians inspect the vehicle. They were able to find a malfunction with the brake hydraulics that had caused way too much stopping power to be sent to the front, González reported.
After testing two other Renegades, González apparently couldn’t replicate the epic nosedive so he was satisfied that he had happened to be driving a broken car. Until last month.
There’s some similar, albeit less extreme, reverse-wheelie action happening with a newer Renegade with a totally different drivetrain—this time one with four-wheel drive and the 2.0-liter engine.
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The Renegade’s quick-lane-change performance, sometimes known as “The Moose Test,” doesn’t look too hot either.
Watch the little Jeep run this gauntlet at about 45 mph, around 01:25 in. The thing loses its composure trying to make its way around those cones and catches serious air time on the inside rear wheel.
The Jeep Renegade has been out for a decent amount of time now. Tens of thousands have been sold. I’ve driven several Jeep Renegades myself and never experienced such a failure to maneuver, which is absolutely what we’re looking at. My experiences testing this vehicle have been mostly positive.
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And yet after about 60 seconds of cursory research on the matter and I found another Renegade, with another driver, in an entirely different country, doing the same rear-end-lift routine under panic braking. Skip to about 9:40 in the video below to see what I’m talking about.
All I’m saying right now is we have video evidence of three unrelated Renegades performing extremely poorly under duress. Is it possible these issues are limited to Jeeps configured for other markets, and they don’t have the same issue in North America?
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We’ve reached out to our contacts at FCA here in the U.S. to get the official take and comment on these incidents, and will update or draw up a new post when we hear back.
Meanwhile, any of you Renegade owners ever accidentally rip a stoppie?
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