2022 Jeep Grand Wagoneer Review

The 2022 Jeep Grand Wagoneer is Jeep’s first try at a truly luxurious interior. At its price, the Grand Wagoneer is meant to go toe-to-toe with veterans of full-size luxury like the Cadillac Escalade and Lincoln Navigator. 

The question is: Has Jeep succeeded? Largely, yes. In some areas, no.

We’ll start with the yes. Our test vehicle is the Grand Wagoneer Obsidian, which is the second-to-highest trim level available, right below the Series III. It starts at $96,845, and after options are tallied, its final price is $109,025. At first glance, this interior looks and feels every penny of that exorbitant price. Get the notion out of your head that Jeep can’t build a luxury car, because it can, and it did.

The Palermo Leather-covered 24-way, heated, cooled and massaging seats are gorgeous to look at with good quilting, contrast stitching and prominent contrast piping. Even the powered headrest is a work of art, and the seat controls themselves are beautifully presented on the door á la Mercedes. Perhaps even more noticeable is the sheer amount of real walnut wood trim adorning the interior. It’s thoughtfully placed throughout, dominates the center console and greatly elevates this interior. Where you don’t see wood, Jeep uses glossy black trim, leather and metal. We’re normally Big Mad about an overuse of glossy black trim, but the only place we can nitpick is its use around the gear selector knob. That’s a high-touch area that will collect fingerprints and dust, but elsewhere, glossy black is used on vertical surfaces where it’s not as prone to problems. Good.

Metal-trimmed buttons and knobs are another mark of luxury, and this Jeep has those in spades. The aforementioned gear knob is one intricately-formed hunk of aluminum, and it’s splendid to use — just wear gloves in winter, because it gets cold. Both the volume and tuning knob are McIntosh-derived (read more about the audio system here), and they turn with a quality heft and feel. The drive mode selector is a metal switch, and so is the ride height selector. Truly, there are few things you touch in this interior that are subpar in quality — even the start/stop button is presented as a centerpiece, surrounded by a bezel and wrapped with a French stitch, all while sitting atop a piece of carved wood. If forced to complain, we’d direct our ire to the flat black and boring-looking turn signal and wiper stalks that are just parts bin pulls from the Stellantis lineup.

It’s a miracle we haven’t mentioned the screens yet, because there are so many of them. With the rear entertainment package, there are eight total screens, including the digital rearview mirror. Most of them are excellent in execution, but there are some issues that might best be referred to as growing pains or huh? moments in the user experience.

For example, the heated/cooled seats are controlled by touch-sensitive areas on a sheet of black piano trim (above upper left). Their backlighting is uneven, and it makes them look a bit cheap/haphazard at night. Plus, their functionality is dubious. It’d take multiple stabs to get them to activate on seemingly every occasion, and forget about trying to turn them on with gloves. We had to resort to turning them on via the controls in the touchscreen at times because they simply would not respond to our touching/pressing.

Another oddity is the placement of the hill descent control. Again, this is a touch-sensitive area on the center console. Passengers accidentally brushed up against this button multiple times throughout the week of testing, triggering the associated beeping and a giant message to pop up in the dash when you’re not expecting it to. Maybe make this one a tougher-to-press physical button, Jeep?

Another oddity related to distraction in the instrument cluster concerns the constant zooming in and zooming out of the gauges. The cluster screen will prioritize a change in cruise control speed by making it pop up large in the screen while it minimizes the gauges behind the message. Just a moment later, the gauges enlarge to their normal size again. If you’re switching between cruise control being on/off or changing the set speed somewhat frequently, it’s like watching a boomerang go back and forth at you in the dash, and it’s distracting. Lastly, for some reason Jeep decided to make the green lights in the cluster informing you that the headlights and foglights are on about five-times larger than in any other car. It’s just plain weird, and it feels like a waste of space.

Moving on from the cluster, the last problematic screen in this car is the rearview camera mirror. Unlike GM’s rearview camera mirror, Jeep’s is especially poor at dealing with bad weather or nighttime driving. Rain, snow or salt make vision worse than a traditional mirror, and the glare from headlights at night do the same. Other companies’ rear camera mirrors are dialed in to deal with these situations far better than Jeep’s, for the Grand Wagoneer’s is only useful in ideal daytime weather conditions.

Back to the good, though. All the other screens are really quite lovely to use, even the trick screen that folds in and out below the main infotainment display. Putting the wireless charger behind this screen is a great way to completely hide a phone away from distraction. And just as we found in the Grand Cherokee, the passenger’s dedicated screen is the same stroke of distraction-free genius. The good technology vibes continue in the rear, where second-row users have a screen between them on the fixed center console for vital car functions as well as screens on the rear of the front seats to watch movies, TV or even play video games. Yeah, you could hook up three game consoles in a Grand Wagoneer and have a little party (the third console can be played via the passenger screen up front). 

Being as large as the Grand Wagoneer is, there’s no lack of space for partying. You can comfortably stretch out in both the second and third row. Seriously, the third row is way better than you’re imagining and we're quite sure it surpasses the Escalade/Tahoe and Navigator/Expedition in terms of both space and comfort (though would need some solid back-to-back time to know for sure). It has outlets and even nicely designed trim all the way back there to make it less of a penalty box than any other full-size SUV. No matter where you sit in this behemoth of an SUV, it’s going to be nice. There will also be plenty of space for your stuff, even with all rows raised.

There’s enough sound deadening throughout that completely silences the 6.4-liter V8 when you don’t want to hear it, but the engine and exhaust is aggressive enough that its burly noise envelops the cabin when you floor it. The McIntosh sound system is second-to-none in user experience, and c’mon, you get to brag about having a McIntosh sound system in your car. 

In many ways, the Grand Wagoneer is the Escalade’s and Navigator’s equal. It certainly doesn’t scrimp on luxury or comfort — the massaging seats are best-in-class. You can’t ding it on materials use, space or lack of available technology. Though, the trouble areas we mentioned could certainly use some cleanup to make the whole-car experience a bit more seamless and user friendly. As a first-try luxury effort, Jeep’s final product is rather remarkable, and its interior is well worth what’s on that sticker. Just as our Editor-in-Chief declared when he first drove a Grand Wagoneer, Jeep is officially a luxury vehicle producer.

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