BY STEVEN COLE SMITH, PHOTOGRAPHY BY JARED HOLSTEIN
The ‘all-new’ Liberty gets no powertrain improvements and a Dodge Nitro“like makeover. Will a Trail Rated badge and a mondo sunroof be enough to make it sell?
Jeep debuted the Liberty for model-year 2002 as the replacement for the 18-year-old Cherokee. The company was hopeful that it could move maybe 160,000 copies of the Liberty in the U.S. per year, and even now, the little SUV that could still does. Jeep sold 133,557 of them in 2006”that’s down from almost 167,000 in 2005, but it’s still a respectable number.
The company figured a six-year model run is long enough, and so the second-generation Liberty debuts at the New York auto show. To what extent Jeep is changing the looks of what has been, next to the Grand Cherokee, its bestseller”well, that’s a bit of a surprise. As with the larger Commander, Jeep has taken the 2008 Liberty in a moderately retro direction to the point where, as the photos suggest, it looks like a slightly shrunken Commander and uncomfortably close to its mechanical twin, the Dodge Nitro. And since the Commander has not exactly been flying out of dealerships, even with $3000 rebates, we’d suspect there’s a little trepidation at HQ in Auburn Hills, Michigan, not to mention at the assembly plant in Toledo, Ohio. (more…)
