Renegade is FCA’s first direct response to the success of a recently-founded segment. They started as a market niche, looking for offering most of typical crossovers’ qualities in smaller packages and charging much less for it. But if the mid-sized ones were already too urban compared to the SUVs on which they were based on the first place, making them cheaper resulted on vehicles such as Ford EcoSport, Opel Mokka and Renault Captur, whose construction doesn’t differ much from a compact hatchback’s. Some of them do offer AWD, or at least higher ride height and off-road tires, but others just rely on funky styling. This is why FCA thought there was a great opportunity for Jeep: if people are claiming for more than off-road wannabes, how about giving them a real SUV?
This is exactly Renegade’s biggest sales argument. The intention was to find the compromise between everything that makes people want these cars and Jeep’s signature characteristics. The exterior, for instance, preserves city-friendly dimensions just like those rivals, but gives bigger importance to numbers like 19-cm ground clearance, 48.2 cm of water fording, 20.6 cm of wheel articulation, approach and departure angles of 30.5° and 34.3°, and up to 1,500 kg of towing capacity. Nevertheless, if you still want to know about “urban numbers”, there’s a 351-liter trunk, which reaches 1,438 liters by folding the rear seats – a task you can execute with the standard 60/40 or the available 40/20/40 bench. Adding trunk and cabin you get a total of 3,358 liters.
Such interior volume is wrapped by a style which Jeep left for its youngest designers to concoct. The results are so interesting because there’s finally someone going away from fluid lines and round volumes. While Cherokee took inspiration on its Grand brother, Renegade honored the automaker’s “old-school” branch and paid tribute to Wrangler, which was based itself on the ‘1941 Willys. The set of square lines start with traditional round lights and Jeep’s signature grille enclosed on a black section, leaving the lower portion with the fog lights and more air intakes. And even though the windshield has an abrupt inclination, Renegade is claimed to have a class-leading drag coefficient.
The rear features square lights whose white portion is X-shaped to remind of jerry cans, just like other details that Jeep treats as hidden “easter eggs” – check out how many of them can you spot using this article’s pictures. Having the entire lower portion painted in black aids to a more balanced look, which adds black-painted wheels only at the Trailhawk trim. The sunroof is very cool for several reasons: it’s a standard item, it’s divided in two independent sections, and you can store each one’s panel beneath the floor. Besides that, since they’re manually-operated, Jeep created an opening mechanism which needs two hands on purpose, in order to prevent bolder drivers from trying to use it while driving.
Entering the car will reveal a room as cool as the outside. The dashboard always uses some accents on a second color, like the pictures’ red, and some trims even add two-tone coating, but everything manages to maintain the blend of Jeep and compact cars’ characteristics. Renegade uses the latest Uconnect infotainment system with 5” or 6.5” touchscreens, but there’s an additional screen at the instrument cluster, which can be a 3.5” monochrome or a 7” TFT, focused on vehicle and trip information. Other cool items are the central air vents, whose shape was taken from ski goggles, and the redline on the gauges, which reminds of an orange paintball splatter. Equipment lists can have all the electronic safety assists, such as blind-spot monitoring and lane-departure warning.
Where Renegade gets “more global” is under the hood. Since this car will hit multiple continents, FCA prepared sixteen powertrain options, to be distributed among its 100+ markets. North America gets a turbocharged 1.4L, reaching 160 hp and 184 lb-ft and restricted to a six-speed manual transmission, and the Tigershark 2.4L, which only uses nine-speed automatic and is good for 184 hp and 177 lb-ft – there will also be Multijet II and e.TorQ engines elsewhere, the first with diesel and the second with flex-fuel technology. You can also choose between two full-time AWD systems: the first one can give up to 100% of torque to any wheel in need, while the other adds hill-descent and Selec-Terrain controls and a low range that reaches 20:1 crawl in first gear.