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CJ
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Copy and paste from a copy and paste. 
It's been about 66 since CJ's had two speed wipers!
My reply - LOL!From Car and Driver....
Why would someone choose a Jeep Wrangler for his (or very often her) daily driver?
The question has been bothering me for 30-some years—ever since a rattle bag of us Car and Driver scribes returned, wet and aching, from a Jeep jaunt in the Michigan woods and declared that the off-road enthusiast was the new sports-car aficionado. The CJ-7, we claimed, was the MGA, the TR3, the Austin-Healey 3000 of the 1970s. (Why someone would choose a British roadster for a daily driver is another question, one that quit bothering me in 1998 when carpenter ants got the last un-museumed Morgan Plus 4.)
The Jeep Wrangler/Sahara/Rubicon makes sense if you’re crossing the Rubicon to get to the Sahara where you’ll be wrangling cattle. But if you’re using it to drop the kids at soccer practice, you’re nuts. And I say this as a brand loyalist. I grew up in Toledo, Ohio. I lived five blocks from the Jeep factory. My family had a CJ-2A, used to plow the lot at O’Rourke Buick and still in the possession of my cousin Mike. The dads of half my classmates at school worked for Willys, I mean Kaiser, um, American Motors, er, Chrysler, uh, Fiat and Barack Obama. I thought my bedtime prayers began, “Now I lay me down to Jeep . . .”
I own one myself, of course, a 1984 Scrambler—two seats with a pickup bed. I bought it from the AMC press fleet one December and drove it from Detroit to New York in the kind of blizzard that would have convinced Roald Amundsen to move to Key West. The 1940-size one-speed windshield wipers were in need of Levitra. The vinyl top was beating away like auditions for a high-school production of Riverdance. The Jeep employed the same heating system used in the vast, half-ruined castles of impoverished Highlands lords. Not that the Jeep’s heating system mattered because—in keeping with Jeep tradition—all the knobs to operate it fell off and were rolling around on the metal floorboards, getting under my feet as I frantically tried to double-clutch the transfer case into four-wheel drive. I saw things slide into ditches that night that I’d never seen in ditches before or since—a highway patrol cruiser, a tow truck. I saw—I swear—a snowplow stuck in the snow. One thing there was, however, that remained on the road, stock tires, opaque windshield, incompetent driver and all. Me. It took 18 hours, but I made it to New York.
Well, there’s one reason to have a Jeep as a family car. Not that anyone goes out in weather like that anymore now that we have flat-screen TVs, a million cable channels, Netflix, and high-speed Internet connections to keep us home. Incidentally, my Scrambler still runs. All the rest of the knobs and most of the other things including engine parts have fallen off, to no apparent ill effect. I have 24,523 miles on it. (The odometer broke in 1985.) Mysterious fluids drip from the undercarriage. The license plate is for a tractor because even the most lenient of the local mechanics won’t give it a state-inspection sticker. But it runs.
So there’s another reason. Yet if you don’t commute from the Ross Ice Shelf and you don’t keep the cars of your youth until your own children move into assisted living, you’re still nuts.
Admittedly, the Jeep has changed since Reagan’s first term. The brakes, for instance—it now has some. And the windshield wipers move at two speeds, maybe more. Therefore, I got into a new Jeep, a classic two-door softtop with the option package designated “Rubicon.” (Note to Jeep marketing department: That’s a pokey little stream in Italy’s industrial northeast that could be traversed in a Fiat Multipla.) I spent a week doing ordinary things in regular weather on a prosaic route down to my (and the Jeep’s) hometown, over to Chicago, and back to Detroit Metro Airport. It was a pleasant enough experience.
The Jeep is nimble in traffic and provides excellent visibility. It’s nice to have roll-up windows and proper doors that lock. Never mind that a thief could rip through the rear side curtains with a rattail comb. You’d have to be a monkey to get into the back seat and a small monkey to sit in it. Storage space is almost nonexistent, and a 75-pound swing-away spare is between you and whatever you’ve got that doesn’t fit back there.
But the driver’s seat is comfortable, in a phys-ed lecture on posture way. A 3.8-liter V-6 with 202 horsepower makes the Jeep quick but no quicker than it needs to be. And the vented front and solid rear discs put an end to quickness quickly. Out on the Ohio Turnpike, the ride and the wind noise were better than what I expected, but what I expected was something like holding a storm window in front of my face while sitting in an office chair being towed on a rope behind a semi. It was better than that.
The Jeep was stable at speed, which, because it weighs 4200 pounds (about half again more than the original military version), it ought to be. The suspension largely worked but was smally useless. That is, I’m sure the pair of solid axles could handle Machu Picchu, but when it comes to little ruts, bumps, potholes, and the expansion joints on bridges, America’s chiropractors send their love. I didn’t test the Jeep’s handling in ess bends or hairpins, but I did leave the highway for an Indiana rest stop going too fast in a light rain on an off-camber exit ramp. An interesting time was had. However, I didn’t make the South Bend nightly news.
And now I want a new Jeep—for my daily driver. I realize I’m not making sense here. But love is like that, and I love the Jeep. I love the purposefulness and simplicity of the thing. Yes, I’m too old to lead a simple life. No, I’m not going to use the Jeep for its intended purposes. But, getting into the Jeep, I like to think I’m the kind of man who might just drive right through the chain-link fence around that Indiana rest stop and take off across the wilderness—well, cornfield, really. And, getting out of the Jeep, I like to think people say, “Yep, that’s the kind of man, no rest stop is big enough for him.”
Cars are our way of moving through life. Cars are an integral manifestation of our being. Cars are an expression of who we are, like clothes. But we can drive naked, so the hell with clothes.
It wasn’t so much the Jeep that made me love the Jeep, it was what everybody else was driving. The integral manifestation of our being was being a bore. Travel around Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois—middle class, Middle America, middle of the road—and you realize what a sad era it is for car culture. There are fabulous exotics, but you don’t see them in Kalamazoo. What you see are the cars and trucks with a base price around 20 grand. And they’re awful. Not that they’re awful cars, exactly. Considered purely as appliances, every one of them is better than anything limitless wealth could buy a generation ago. Some are fun to drive—Subaru Impreza, Mazdaspeed 3. Many are good value—Honda Civic, Kia Optima. But crash tests, CAFE standards, aerodynamics, and digitally fidgety design twerps have conspired to fill roads with nonentity.
Once, it was possible to say a bit too much about yourself with your new car. There was the which-way-did-he-go? Studebaker of 1950, Elmer Fudd’s 1953 Henry J, the 1958 kick-me Nash Metropolitan, the ’57 through ’60 nuke-’em Plymouths, and the “Robin, bring the Batmobile around” 1959 Chevy.
Now there’s banality even in the model names. I made fun of Jeep for calling itself Rubicon, but at least Caesar’s road trip provided Rome with a little excitement. It’s better than Toyota’s fake Latin: “Corolla Yaris Venza Matrix.” Or Ford’s New Age babble: “Focus on your Fusion, Taurus.” Or Honda’s e-mail from the local zoning board: “Does the Civic Insight Fit? We’re in Accord.”
What can a person of modest means do to get a life, automotively? A bit of variety is still extant. You can buy a Kia Soul, a Nissan Cube, a Scion xB, or a Honda Element. Something wrong in your bong? You can get a Chevrolet HHR, which is like admitting you’re too out of it for a PT Cruiser. If you’re really cute, you can drive a Mini Cooper. Or a New Beetle if you’re so cute you’re about to pop. There’s a Smart Fortwo, but you’re not stupid. Pickups are a possibility, when you can find one that hasn’t been up-optioned into BMW price territory. The Mahindra, on its way from India, might do, although it appears to be built by people who have heard of pickups but have never seen one.
Give me a Jeep. It’s not perfect, but neither are we or we’d be able to afford Maserati Quattroportes. The Jeep is straight, square, forthright. It reminds us of something that makes us feel good. And, if being reminded of WWII makes us feel good compared with what other cars remind us of, those are some damn creepy cars. At least the Jeep looks like a motor vehicle, not a netsuke or a plush toy or what the computer-styling software did when the cat went to sleep on the keyboard.
The Jeep is a manly device. And a womanly device. An American device. It’s a fitting instrument to transport the free people of a free nation with the respect to which we are entitled and the dignity that we deserve. Okay, we’re a little crazy to have a Jeep for a daily driver. But if we go off our meds, we might wind up in a Prius.
It's been about 66 since CJ's had two speed wipers!
. he's complaining about how a coil sprung jk rides and drives, he ought to try and drive a lifted 
