Autoweek Test: Cherokee SRT8 vs. Range Rover Sport Supercharged
06-26-06, 02:35 PM
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Autoweek Test: Cherokee SRT8 vs. Range Rover Sport Supercharged
Cherokee SRT8 vs. Range Rover Sport
These powerful brutes may be bad, but driving them is oh so good
AutoWeek | Published 06/26/06, 7:42 am et
These powerful brutes may be bad, but driving them is oh so good
AutoWeek | Published 06/26/06, 7:42 am et
Are big, powerful performance SUVs really necessary in these fuel-conscious four-dollar-a-gallon times? Of course not. But are they fun? Heck yeah!
You can’t always explain the things you love, why you love them, and why you’re willing to buy two or three times more gas to make them go a given distance. But when you can go as fast as these things go, you don’t have to stick around to give any explanations.
Sure, dropping a 6.1-liter Hemi into a Grand Cherokee or putting a supercharger on an already super 4.2-liter Range Rover V8 is not politically correct in this day and age. But this isn’t politics we’re discussing, it’s horsepower. If you must come up with a defense for your lust, just say these vehicles are like sports cars only more practical, since they seat five for extraordinarily fast car-pooling. They also have room for groceries, unlike, say, an electric bike or an Enzo.
So in the defenseless spirit of horsepower lust, we present the Big Brutal Performance SUV DoubleTake. Fasten your seatbelts and return your tray tables to their upright and full locked positions.
Though profitable, this market segment isn’t what you would call crowded. The BMW X5 and Porsche Cayenne Turbo are superbly well-engineered entries that will unroll your socks at every green light. The Mercedes-Benz AMG ML55 was good in its day but is now on the certified used-car list. The two most recent entries are the ones we chose to compare—the Land Rover Range Rover Sport and the Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8.
The Range Rover Sport came out a year ago, the performance flagship for a brand that never really considered performance. It is based on the LR3 platform but with a shorter wheelbase and shorter overall length. The Sport follows the classic muscle-car recipe of a big engine stuffed into a little package.
The Grand Cherokee SRT8 came out last winter and follows the same design motif: Stuff a huge engine into an unsuspecting vehicle and have at it.
We had at it with both.
First it was to the drag strip, where all good grudge matches go. Here you would expect the Grand Cherokee to whup on the Brit. It is built by Chrysler’s Street and Racing Technology division, after all, which seems incapable of doing wrong. If they came out with an SRT toaster, we’d look forward to putting our bagels in it.
SRT took a Chrysler 5.7-liter V8 and bored it out, increased compression, and installed larger valves, intake and exhaust manifolds and lumpier cams. This engine makes 420 hp and 420 lb-ft of torque, enough to blow the doors off any far more sensible car on the planet. Even though the curb weight of this Grand Cherokee is a whopping 4819 pounds, it is still agile and powerful enough to get to 60 mph from a standstill in just 4.7 seconds.
“Well, it’s fast all right,” said the test pilot into his tape recorder after the very first run. “Just takes right off, slams you back into your seat without any tire squeal whatsoever; it just plain goes.”
The 60-mph time and the subsequent 13.36 seconds at 102.5 mph in the quarter-mile are better than everything else we have tested in the class by a significant margin. The closest is the Cayenne Turbo, at 5.16 seconds to 60 mph (Sept. 29, 2003). Everything else falls off precipitously from there. In fact, the SRT8 is quicker and faster than both the Pontiac GTO and Ford Mustang GT we tested (both on Jan. 10, 2005).
The Range Rover Sport? It takes more than two additional seconds than did the SRT8 to get to 60 mph, achieving that goal in 6.82 seconds. Maybe we should have just packed up the white lab coats right then and there and headed to the Pomona Denny’s for Spam and eggs.
But no: We love the Range Rover Sport, too. It got its 4.2-liter V8 shortly after BMW sold Land Rover to Ford. Ford needed something to replace the 4.4-liter BMW V8 and still maintain that prestige and cachet, so it looked down the product sheet and found the Jaguar block. To really add something, Ford bolted in a tuned ZF six-speed found in—get this—the Aston Martin DB9! Allo guvn’r! The combination works smoothly and effortlessly in the Sport, and we found it an unfettered breeze on the freeway and in city driving.
But even with the supercharger, the Range Rover engine makes just 390 hp and 410 lb-ft of torque. Saddle it with a groaning 5671 pounds of curb weight, the heaviest in the class by many a stone, and the Sport is hopelessly outgunned as soon as the green light flashes.
That’s in a straight line, but how about handling? That’s important, isn’t it, even for SUVs, at least SUVs in this class? We headed to the slalom.
Again the Grand Cherokee mopped the floor with the Range Rover, flying through our 490-foot slalom at 43.3 mph compared to the Sport’s 41.1 mph.
Both SUVs are beefed up underneath so their suspensions can better handle the added power. The SRT8’s ride is lowered one inch, plus it has new front suspension knuckles to optimize camber angle, and tuned shocks, springs and roll bars for better performance. The drawback is that while the Jeep handles better the more you push it, the regular around-town ride is much harsher than the Land Rover’s.
The Sport’s Dynamic Response Suspension features an active roll bar to counter its almost three tons of lean. When we drove Range Rovers back to back with and without the active roll bars, we noticed a sizeable difference and much prefer those with the bar.
But while the six-speed automatic will stay in the selected gear through the slalom, it shifts on its own when it thinks best—even when it is in the manual mode. That’s irritating. Plus the stability control would intervene almost as soon as we would round the first cone, desperately trying to keep the craft upright, and thus nixing any hope of a faster speed.
The Range Rover is tops in the braking test, stopping from 60 mph in just 117 feet smoothly, with less intrusive action from the ABS and with only moderate dive.
The SRT8 has four-piston Brembos at all four wheels with 14.2x1.25 vented discs front and 13.8x1.1 vented discs at the rear. Still, the Jeep takes 136 feet to stop from 60 mph. The difference broadens from 80 mph, with the Range Rover stopping in 208 feet to the Grand Cherokee’s 245 feet. Interestingly, the Sport has four-piston Brembos on the front only, with a lesser rear setup, proving the bench-racer’s old saw that rear brakes are for show (well, mostly).
But hang on a second, you say, these are SUVs. What about the off-road stuff? Huh?
Okay, the Range Rover totally kicks the Jeep’s rear bumper in off-roading. The Sport’s Terrain Response System has five modes for driving, including a low-range for rock crawling and a Hill Descent mode. Its approach and departure angles are those of a genuine boulder-creeper, and we have no doubt you could drive it up Kilimanjaro without spilling your double-caff latte.
The SRT8 doesn’t crawl out of bed here. Okay, that’s too cruel—the Jeep designers chose to emphasize the SRT8’s pavement prowess over the stock Grand Cherokee’s considerable talents where the pavement ends. In any case, the first thing you would do in taking an SRT8 off-road is to pop the front air dam clean off. The center diff is made for highway cruising and drag strip launches—there is no low-range available.
On-road is where owners will spend almost all of their time in these SUVs anyway. And on-road, again, we feel downright coddled in the Range Rover.
The Sport’s interior is loaded with amenities we appreciated throughout our tenure with it, even though it is more cramped and less practical than the interior of the SRT8. We could load stuff and people into the Jeep without so much as thinking about its geometry.
While the SRT8 outperforms the Sport at the track, on the road to and from the track we prefer the Range Rover. Street and racing performance is mostly what we measured, though, and even before you factor in its $30,000 price advantage, the win goes to the Street and Racing Technology entry. Still, it is the Range Rover Sport we want to take home.
MORE VIEWS
When you drop the hammer on the Grand Cherokee SRT8 you almost think something is wrong with the speedometer as nothing this big and heavy should accelerate that fast. While the Range Rover Sport isn’t as quick as the Jeep, it remains trail-worthy for any off-road adventure. But this is about on-road prowess, and for that I’d take the SRT8. ROGER HART
Hmmm, this is a tough one. Two powerful über utes, one priced astonishingly more than the other. I like ’em both: I like the Rover’s style and the Jeep’s performance. I also like that they are both so politically incorrect. Forced to choose, I guess I would take the Jeep: It offers more power and is a lot cheaper. Easy choice. WES RAYNAL
The Range Rover Sport is the supermodel who is an extreme athlete, who looks good well made up and takes your breath away getting out of bed all disheveled. Who among us, so long as our hearts could stand it, wouldn’t want to spend time with that? DUTCH MANDEL
Yes, these are two fast SUVs, but under the skin they are also very different. The Grand Cherokee SRT8 is all about brute power, whereas the Range Rover Sport is merely quick but much more extravagant. So it depends on one’s budget and whether pulling up to the curb or around one is more important. In this case, the SRT8’s balance of price, amenities and performance snagged my vote. ANDREW LUU
You can’t always explain the things you love, why you love them, and why you’re willing to buy two or three times more gas to make them go a given distance. But when you can go as fast as these things go, you don’t have to stick around to give any explanations.
Sure, dropping a 6.1-liter Hemi into a Grand Cherokee or putting a supercharger on an already super 4.2-liter Range Rover V8 is not politically correct in this day and age. But this isn’t politics we’re discussing, it’s horsepower. If you must come up with a defense for your lust, just say these vehicles are like sports cars only more practical, since they seat five for extraordinarily fast car-pooling. They also have room for groceries, unlike, say, an electric bike or an Enzo.
So in the defenseless spirit of horsepower lust, we present the Big Brutal Performance SUV DoubleTake. Fasten your seatbelts and return your tray tables to their upright and full locked positions.
Though profitable, this market segment isn’t what you would call crowded. The BMW X5 and Porsche Cayenne Turbo are superbly well-engineered entries that will unroll your socks at every green light. The Mercedes-Benz AMG ML55 was good in its day but is now on the certified used-car list. The two most recent entries are the ones we chose to compare—the Land Rover Range Rover Sport and the Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8.
The Range Rover Sport came out a year ago, the performance flagship for a brand that never really considered performance. It is based on the LR3 platform but with a shorter wheelbase and shorter overall length. The Sport follows the classic muscle-car recipe of a big engine stuffed into a little package.
The Grand Cherokee SRT8 came out last winter and follows the same design motif: Stuff a huge engine into an unsuspecting vehicle and have at it.
We had at it with both.
First it was to the drag strip, where all good grudge matches go. Here you would expect the Grand Cherokee to whup on the Brit. It is built by Chrysler’s Street and Racing Technology division, after all, which seems incapable of doing wrong. If they came out with an SRT toaster, we’d look forward to putting our bagels in it.
SRT took a Chrysler 5.7-liter V8 and bored it out, increased compression, and installed larger valves, intake and exhaust manifolds and lumpier cams. This engine makes 420 hp and 420 lb-ft of torque, enough to blow the doors off any far more sensible car on the planet. Even though the curb weight of this Grand Cherokee is a whopping 4819 pounds, it is still agile and powerful enough to get to 60 mph from a standstill in just 4.7 seconds.
“Well, it’s fast all right,” said the test pilot into his tape recorder after the very first run. “Just takes right off, slams you back into your seat without any tire squeal whatsoever; it just plain goes.”
The 60-mph time and the subsequent 13.36 seconds at 102.5 mph in the quarter-mile are better than everything else we have tested in the class by a significant margin. The closest is the Cayenne Turbo, at 5.16 seconds to 60 mph (Sept. 29, 2003). Everything else falls off precipitously from there. In fact, the SRT8 is quicker and faster than both the Pontiac GTO and Ford Mustang GT we tested (both on Jan. 10, 2005).
The Range Rover Sport? It takes more than two additional seconds than did the SRT8 to get to 60 mph, achieving that goal in 6.82 seconds. Maybe we should have just packed up the white lab coats right then and there and headed to the Pomona Denny’s for Spam and eggs.
But no: We love the Range Rover Sport, too. It got its 4.2-liter V8 shortly after BMW sold Land Rover to Ford. Ford needed something to replace the 4.4-liter BMW V8 and still maintain that prestige and cachet, so it looked down the product sheet and found the Jaguar block. To really add something, Ford bolted in a tuned ZF six-speed found in—get this—the Aston Martin DB9! Allo guvn’r! The combination works smoothly and effortlessly in the Sport, and we found it an unfettered breeze on the freeway and in city driving.
But even with the supercharger, the Range Rover engine makes just 390 hp and 410 lb-ft of torque. Saddle it with a groaning 5671 pounds of curb weight, the heaviest in the class by many a stone, and the Sport is hopelessly outgunned as soon as the green light flashes.
That’s in a straight line, but how about handling? That’s important, isn’t it, even for SUVs, at least SUVs in this class? We headed to the slalom.
Again the Grand Cherokee mopped the floor with the Range Rover, flying through our 490-foot slalom at 43.3 mph compared to the Sport’s 41.1 mph.
Both SUVs are beefed up underneath so their suspensions can better handle the added power. The SRT8’s ride is lowered one inch, plus it has new front suspension knuckles to optimize camber angle, and tuned shocks, springs and roll bars for better performance. The drawback is that while the Jeep handles better the more you push it, the regular around-town ride is much harsher than the Land Rover’s.
The Sport’s Dynamic Response Suspension features an active roll bar to counter its almost three tons of lean. When we drove Range Rovers back to back with and without the active roll bars, we noticed a sizeable difference and much prefer those with the bar.
But while the six-speed automatic will stay in the selected gear through the slalom, it shifts on its own when it thinks best—even when it is in the manual mode. That’s irritating. Plus the stability control would intervene almost as soon as we would round the first cone, desperately trying to keep the craft upright, and thus nixing any hope of a faster speed.
The Range Rover is tops in the braking test, stopping from 60 mph in just 117 feet smoothly, with less intrusive action from the ABS and with only moderate dive.
The SRT8 has four-piston Brembos at all four wheels with 14.2x1.25 vented discs front and 13.8x1.1 vented discs at the rear. Still, the Jeep takes 136 feet to stop from 60 mph. The difference broadens from 80 mph, with the Range Rover stopping in 208 feet to the Grand Cherokee’s 245 feet. Interestingly, the Sport has four-piston Brembos on the front only, with a lesser rear setup, proving the bench-racer’s old saw that rear brakes are for show (well, mostly).
But hang on a second, you say, these are SUVs. What about the off-road stuff? Huh?
Okay, the Range Rover totally kicks the Jeep’s rear bumper in off-roading. The Sport’s Terrain Response System has five modes for driving, including a low-range for rock crawling and a Hill Descent mode. Its approach and departure angles are those of a genuine boulder-creeper, and we have no doubt you could drive it up Kilimanjaro without spilling your double-caff latte.
The SRT8 doesn’t crawl out of bed here. Okay, that’s too cruel—the Jeep designers chose to emphasize the SRT8’s pavement prowess over the stock Grand Cherokee’s considerable talents where the pavement ends. In any case, the first thing you would do in taking an SRT8 off-road is to pop the front air dam clean off. The center diff is made for highway cruising and drag strip launches—there is no low-range available.
On-road is where owners will spend almost all of their time in these SUVs anyway. And on-road, again, we feel downright coddled in the Range Rover.
The Sport’s interior is loaded with amenities we appreciated throughout our tenure with it, even though it is more cramped and less practical than the interior of the SRT8. We could load stuff and people into the Jeep without so much as thinking about its geometry.
While the SRT8 outperforms the Sport at the track, on the road to and from the track we prefer the Range Rover. Street and racing performance is mostly what we measured, though, and even before you factor in its $30,000 price advantage, the win goes to the Street and Racing Technology entry. Still, it is the Range Rover Sport we want to take home.
MORE VIEWS
When you drop the hammer on the Grand Cherokee SRT8 you almost think something is wrong with the speedometer as nothing this big and heavy should accelerate that fast. While the Range Rover Sport isn’t as quick as the Jeep, it remains trail-worthy for any off-road adventure. But this is about on-road prowess, and for that I’d take the SRT8. ROGER HART
Hmmm, this is a tough one. Two powerful über utes, one priced astonishingly more than the other. I like ’em both: I like the Rover’s style and the Jeep’s performance. I also like that they are both so politically incorrect. Forced to choose, I guess I would take the Jeep: It offers more power and is a lot cheaper. Easy choice. WES RAYNAL
The Range Rover Sport is the supermodel who is an extreme athlete, who looks good well made up and takes your breath away getting out of bed all disheveled. Who among us, so long as our hearts could stand it, wouldn’t want to spend time with that? DUTCH MANDEL
Yes, these are two fast SUVs, but under the skin they are also very different. The Grand Cherokee SRT8 is all about brute power, whereas the Range Rover Sport is merely quick but much more extravagant. So it depends on one’s budget and whether pulling up to the curb or around one is more important. In this case, the SRT8’s balance of price, amenities and performance snagged my vote. ANDREW LUU
Last edited by magneto112; 06-26-06 at 02:39 PM.
06-26-06, 03:26 PM
#4
Super Moderator
I have driven both of these and the SRT-8 is a god awful monster with power. I went to another 1/4 mile track yesterday and on the toll highway over the mountains to Toluca one of these things comes barreling down on the mountain curves, which was its real problem and you need a good driver for one of these vehicles at high speed. The higher center of gravity probably meant going down the mountain road was like a rollercoaster. I ended up seeing this same Jeep at the track, but did not get to see it run.
The Range Rover is a very luxurious vehicle with lots of great features. Reminded me superenhanced interior of my family´s two 1980s Jaguar XJ6s. The power does not come off immediately like the Jeep and seemed much closer to how my little RX300 takes off with its modifications.
Both great cars, but not exactly perfect in my book for the cash.
The Range Rover is a very luxurious vehicle with lots of great features. Reminded me superenhanced interior of my family´s two 1980s Jaguar XJ6s. The power does not come off immediately like the Jeep and seemed much closer to how my little RX300 takes off with its modifications.
Both great cars, but not exactly perfect in my book for the cash.
06-26-06, 04:36 PM
#7
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Originally Posted by Yoko
Yah, I also doubt that people will actually cross-shop these two vehicles.
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06-26-06, 07:32 PM
#9
Lexus Test Driver
Originally Posted by videcormeum
The Range is well worth the extra cash. But, let's be honest, nobody will EVER cross-shop these two vehicles.
M.
M.
06-27-06, 03:56 PM
#12
Originally Posted by videcormeum
Let me just ... ah there we go.
I don't know if it's worth $30k - but I'd rather be in picture #2.
M.
I don't know if it's worth $30k - but I'd rather be in picture #2.
M.
06-28-06, 05:40 AM
#14
Lexus Fanatic
Jeep should consider dropping the SRT Hemi into the Commander. IMO it is a far better vehicle than the Grand Cherokee ( see my recent Commander review ), but I'm afraid if they did so that they would beef up the suspension and tires to the point where the Commander would lose its smooth ride.
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