Shed of the Week: Jeep Cherokee 4.0 Orvis
What's in a name?
What's a used car worth? The usual answer to that is, whatever someone's prepared to cough up for it.
The trouble for sellers, of course, is that the coughing number isn't always that close to the asking number. Take this week's Shed: a Jeep Cherokee 4.0 Orvis. You may think that £1500 is a bit strong, and that £750 might be nearer the mark. The beauty of Shed metal is that the difference between the asking and the coughing numbers is never that great. Convincing a supercar seller to take a 50 percent hit on their asking price would net you enough cash to buy a house, but applying the same level of bargaining cheek at Shed level is a lot easier because the amounts involved really aren't going to hurt anyone.
So, let's assume that you could snag this Cherokee Orvis for somewhat less than the asking price. What would you be getting? And what the hell is an Orvis anyway? Isn't it some kind of South American burrowing mammal?
No. It was a 'special edition' Cherokee built between 1995 and 1997, when Jeep had a marketing tie-up with an American purveyor of sporting gear and apparel for people who liked to go out and kill stuff. Today, Orvis will sell you some Snakeproof Gaiters for $149, a Tweed Balmoral Cap (flat hat) for $98, and a Handwoven Upland Lanyard (which is basically a leather string with a compass and a whistle) for just $179. It is 'heirloom quality', mind you.
In the UK, Orvis sells a slightly pruned selection of huntin' and fishin' gear, including £850 fishing rods and various dung-coloured items of 'expedition clothing', but they'll also try and flog you the odd novelty item that you'd normally only expect to see in a multi-million dollar Colorado log cabin. For example, the tasteful Moose Foot Rest (put your feet up and show your contempt for the noble beasts of the field at the same time, £179) or some Orvis Fatwood - 6.8 kilos of designer-scented fire kindling sticks in a burlap sack for just £25.
This is the second Orvis to pop up in SOTW in the last couple of years. As you can see, Jeep UK thankfully binned the eyebrow-raising US colourways of Moss Green or Light Driftwood featuring Orvis's uniquely vile-sounding "beige-and-green luxury leather seating surfaces with red piping and matching door panel accents". Instead, they went for a more sober black. With a set of leather Hi-Pouffe Squidge-A-Rama seats, also in black, plus a few slivers cut from a length of Wood-U-Like® four-by-two, the result actually looks more than all right.
The Le Mans 24H door decals and screen passes and the Rossi 46 sticker on the rear glass suggest an interesting life spent on the road. The vendor's travelling partner has been travelling in style too, judging by the sheepskin seat and mat covers. It's really not that hard to imagine yourself in a premium motor - until you begin to prod the Jeep's rickety switchgear and start to lose coins, food items and small children in the interior panel gaps, anyway. Well, it wasn't quite that bad, but it is true that build quality wasn't something US customers worried too much about in the 1990s.
Standard equipment levels have shot up over the last 20 years too, but back in the 1990s British motorists saw the Grand Cherokee as a rolling testament to American electronic excess. 'Rolling' wasn't always the right word, given the occasional frailty of the Jeep's electrics, but their Fred Flintstone-era AMC-born 4.0 litre straight six was the engineering equivalent of a Saharan camel. It could trace its lineage back to 1964, when it was designed in conjunction with, would you believe, Renault. By 2001 they'd produced five million of these 4.0 pushrod motors. The air filter can get bunged up with blow-by from worn rings, but in general these 4.0s deliver relaxed long-distance cruising and easy 200k mileages without major rebuilds.
They also deliver retro fuel consumption and a tendency to moisten the car's undersides with escaping oil, courtesy of a mildly weepy rear main seal. Despite that clever rustproofing trick, the Cherokee is not immune from brown infestation. The MOT tester dealing with this car for the last six and a bit years is obviously quite the stickler, as he's been reporting rust practically from the start of the seller's time with it. The good news is that his warnings of 2012 don't seem to have become any more strident over time.
Doubters may have to eat their words when they put the Cherokee's Quadra-Trac permanent all-time four-wheel-drive to the test. It's a highly competent system. With winter approaching, Quadra-Trac plus that nice new towbar could make you a popular fellow down your way. This cartoon tells you how it and the associated brake-lock diff works. You do need to make sure that a Cherokee's tyres are properly matched or it can tie itself into expensive knots. Faulty aircons aren't cheap to fix either. Fortunately this car is sorted on both fronts.
There's not a lot of room in the back of a Cherokee, and even less in the very back thanks to the intrusive spare, but on the plus side this car does apparently have Bluetooth for 'steaming' music. We're going to put that down as a typo though becaus the engine does not have a reputation for head gasket failure.
Good spot
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nDmptnw7zYo#fauxfull...
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