FIRST DRIVE I 2020 Jeep Gladiator Mojave
F
orget the Rubicon. The Gladiator
Mojave is the best Gladiator, full
stop. It will do 90 percent of what the
Rubicon will, but the Rubicon can’t do
half of what the Mojave can.
Here’s why: The Jeep Gladiator was
never going to be a great rock crawler, and
that’s what the Rubicon is set up to do:
scratch and claw its way over anything.
The problem is, it has the longest wheel-
base of any short-bed truck in its class.
Without modifications, the Gladiator
is going to drag its belly and potentially
high-center on obstacles other trucks
would clear. This rock crawling weak-
ness is the Gladiator Mojave’s strength.
Long-wheelbase vehicles are inherently
more stable when cornering, meaning
they’re less likely to oversteer. Although
power slides are fun, on a bumpy trail they
can easily lead to a tire digging in and flip-
ping the vehicle. Stable is what you want.
Ripping down the back entry road into
Johnson Valley Off-Highway VehicleArea, where the annual King of the
Hammers off-road race takes place, the
Mojave is eating up the winter-ravaged
dirt road. Road graders from the Bureau
of Land Management haven’t made it
out here yet, and the road bears witness.
The long-wheelbase Mojave, bolstered
by a slightly wider front track versus the
Rubicon and Falken Wildpeak A/T3W
tires, doesn’t care. Things are bumpy, sure,
but the speed I’m carrying is staggering.
Jeep knocked down the low-range
ratio on the Mojave to the standard 2.72:1
compared to the Rubicon’s 4.10:1, so it can
go faster in four low, but it’s still elec-
tronically limited to 45 mph. Four high,
however, does not have a limit so far as I
can tell. I chickened out at 75 mph on the
trail—the nearest hospital is 34 miles away.
When MT photographer, Jade Nelson,
finally caught up in my long-term Ram
1500 Laramie, I asked him how fast
he’d managed in that independent front
suspension 4x4. On the smoothest
sections, he said, 45 mph. He felt like he
was hurting it. That’s about as fast as we
managed in the Gladiator Rubicon on
the Mojave Road, and it wasn’t pleasant,
either. The Gladiator Mojave could’ve
gone faster if it had a more reckless driver.
That’s on the little stuff, though. In
the big holes and moguls, the Ram—and
even the Rubicon—had to slow to 20 mph
or less to keep from bottoming out the
suspension and avoid breaking things. I
was hitting them at 45 mph in the Mojave.
The only time the Mojave met its limit
was on closely spaced moguls, where the
peak of one hump is pushing the rear end
up and the nose down just as the frontend is about to impact the next hump. It’s
about the hardest you can bash a front
suspension, and the Mojave’s big Fox
shocks and hydraulic bumpstops not only
saved the front end but also made the big
impacts significantly softer than in any
other off-road truck I’ve driven through
the same obstacle—Raptor included. If
only Jeep had done the same for the rear
axle. As one of the Mojave’s few areas
with room for improvement, the rear axle
comes down harder on its plain old rubber
bumpstops than the front, and you can feel
it in the cab. It’s not enough to unsettle
the truck, but you could go even faster and
do so even more comfortably if the rear
axle wasn’t getting beat up as badly. The
other area is under the hood. The standardWORDS SCOTT EVANS PHOTOGRAPHS JADE NELSONTHE MOJAVE TRIM PACKAGE GOES
ANYWHERE AND GETS THERE FASTER
JJ
38 MOTORTREND.COM SEPTEMBER 2020