Jeep Wrangler YJ

This is the most criticised styling decision in Jeep's history and it comes down to two rectangles. The YJ kept the seven-slot grille, the round wheel arches, the flat bonnet, the folding windscreen and the bolt-on wings, and then set the headlights into the grille as rectangles instead of circles. Nothing else about the vehicle looks unlike a Jeep, and yet the change was enough that owners have argued about it for four decades. Chuck Mashigan's team began the design in 1982 and froze it in the autumn of 1983, and the other visual tell of their work is smaller and easier to miss: the wipers park down on the windscreen glass rather than at the base, which no Wrangler has done since. Underneath, the design work that mattered was invisible. The springs are wider than a CJ's, the track is wider, and the addition of trackbar links and anti-roll bars was a serious response to the criticism the CJ-5 had attracted. Round headlights returned with the TJ in 1996, and the market has treated that as an admission ever since.

Jeep ran no factory competition programme for the YJ, and the reason is corporate rather than technical: the vehicle was launched by an American Motors that was months from being sold and then inherited by a Chrysler with no appetite for putting a leaf-sprung utility into competition when its performance budget was going elsewhere. There was no series for it either. Its record is therefore entirely amateur, and it is substantial, because the YJ arrived exactly as organised recreational off-roading was professionalising. It became standard equipment at club trials, at rockcrawling events, and on the Rubicon Trail, and the enormous aftermarket that grew up around it in the 1990s exists precisely because so many were being competed in and broken. The wider track that made it better on a road also made it a more stable base for serious trail machinery than a CJ. The 4.0 six went on to have a competition life of its own in buggies and specials long after the vehicles it came in were scrapped. No championships, no works team, and a great many trophies won by people who paid for their own vehicles.

The YJ is the Jeep of the 1990s and its most durable cultural moment involves dinosaurs. Two 1992 Saharas, in the film's own green and yellow livery with the InGen markings, appear in Jurassic Park in 1993, and they have been inseparable from the vehicle ever since. Owners still build tribute cars, the paint scheme is instantly readable to people who have never thought about Jeeps, and a generation formed its idea of what a Wrangler is from those two vehicles moving through a fence. Beyond that, the YJ is the vehicle that made the Wrangler mainstream. It sold 685,071 units and put an open four-wheel drive in suburban driveways across America, ski towns, beach towns and university car parks, and it did so while enthusiasts were still complaining about the headlights. That tension is the interesting part of its cultural position: it is simultaneously the least respected Jeep and the one that carried the brand into the mass market. The people who mocked it in 1987 are now buying them, which is how these things usually go.

A YJ is cheap to buy and honest about what it wants. Frame rust is the one thing that decides whether an owner is happy, and it concentrates above the rear spring hangers, at the skid plate mounts and around the body mounts, often under fresh underseal. Body tubs rot at the footwells, floors, rear corners and along the bottom of the windscreen frame. The soft top leaks, the doors never sealed properly, and wind noise at motorway speed is a permanent feature rather than a fault. The Dana 35 rear axle is dependable on the road and much less so when worked hard, so an off-road life shows up there first. Carburetted 4.2 cars can be fussy to set up correctly, which is one more reason to want a 1991 or later car. Pre-1996 vehicles predate OBD-II so diagnosis needs the right equipment. None of it is expensive and none of it is mysterious, and because the vehicle has been in continuous enthusiast use for decades every fault has a well-documented fix.