Comparison Tests
Newspaper wit Art Buchwald said that when you drive home in Los Angeles, your house may meet you halfway. L.A. is a city on the move—literally, about an inch every year, toward the northwest. Two immense slabs of the Earth’s crust, the Pacific plate and the North American plate—each one thousands of miles wide and 60 miles thick—are sideswiping each other in a geologic fender bender that has been under way for 30 million years. Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and most of California’s teeming cities and towns are sitting right on the rub strip, year by year lurching closer and closer to Alaska.
As in any car crash, surfaces are getting wrinkled. Californians owe their up-thrusting coastal mountains—and the solitary deserts behind them—to the incessant grinding of rock in the fissures beneath their feet. Documenting faults is what we do here at C/D, so we selected four trucks with four-wheel drive and off-road pretensions and crawled deep into the seismic rift zones to the north and east of L.A., looking for faults while in the, um, faults.
The 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee is the newest, and we opted for the full, double-chili-with-onions Overland V-8 this time (we tested a low-option V-6 model in the September issue). Of the $45,240 as-tested price, the Off-Road Adventure II package (skid plates, a full-size spare, off-road tires, and 18-inch wheels) is responsible for just $275. Clearly, Jeep wants you out there getting dirty.
Kia’s Borrego is from a dying breed: the big, body-on-frame, not-too-pricey SUV. This loaded Limited is the test’s only other V-8 and the cheapest, at $40,790, with no options taken or needed. The aging Nissan Pathfinder now also offers a V-8, but we instead locked and loaded a more well-rounded, $43,655 deluxe LE with a 4.0-liter V-6, which also kept its price closer to the $40K mark.
An indicator of change in the truck segment: Toyota’s new-for-2010 4Runner has the only solid rear axle in this group. The Trail model is the get-muddy version, with sparse exterior decoration and blacked-out fender flares. Our $40,957 copy was outfitted with the $1750 kinetic dynamic suspension, which automatically disconnects the anti-roll bars when more wheel travel is needed
Dozens of earthquakes strike daily in Southern California, most too slight to be felt. The looming “Big One,” a major rupture that violently rearranges the landscape every couple hundred years or so, is overdue [see subpage]. With local geologists glued to their seismometers, we were obliged to rely on the “Desert Wookie” and his sidekick, “Wild Bill,” for guidance into the sun-scorched heart of earthquake country. A mysterious pair, their conversation frequently turned to high-caliber weapons and bygone Navy SEAL operations. In exchange for their encyclopedic desert knowledge, they demanded anonymity, and—directed early on to the legally registered shirt lumps at their waists—we obliged and gratefully submitted to their command.
