Jeep Compass Review: Jeep Lite

The Washington Post has an interesting review of the Compass.

Consider the 2007 Jeep Compass - the Jeep for people who don't want Jeeps.

Yeah... ok. I would disagree with this guy. At one of our previous MoJeepin Meet -n- Greets, we had a Compass there and it was in full glory with most of the crowd. It actually brought more attention to it then the RTI ramp. Here is another snippet of the Washington Post's article:

You give your new Jeep a fuel-efficient, 2.4-liter, four-cylinder, 172-horsepower gasoline engine. But you make sure that the Europeans and South Americans get a diesel engine - a two-liter, four-cylinder diesel engine in the case of the Compass. Why diesel for the overseas markets? You do it because you're smart enough to know that in many European markets, 50 percent of new vehicles are sold with diesel engines that generally get better fuel economy than the gasoline models.

Then you outfit your Compass with lots of standard safety equipment, including side and head air bags and traction control.

And you add storage bins and cup holders everywhere, and lots of easily accessible cargo space.

But all of that stuff costs money.

So, to keep the price down, especially in the base model, you use acres of plastic, hoping that buyers of the base version won't be too offended by the standard hand-crank windows and the palpable cheapness of interior materials.

And then, with all of that done, you sally forth with pronouncements that, at long last, you've produced a "breakthrough vehicle" for the "nontraditional Jeep buyer."

You ignore the chorus of critics who say that you've lost your way with your new Compass.

You insist that you know where you're going with this vehicle. You're charting a new direction, you hope, to the bank.

You can read the entire review here