Jeep’s Gladiator is a funky-looking, do-it-all alternative to the Wrangler. It seeks to remedy the problem some Wrangler owners might have, wherein the back seats are full of pets and kids, but the Wrangler’s trunk isn’t enough for all the toys. With a longer bed and a Wrangler cab attached, the Jeep truck should be the best of both worlds. To find out if it hauls pets as well as it does people and cargo, we put it to the test.
As usual, our tester is my huge 85-pound Goldendoodle, Beorn. He’s happy to be here, and he works for cheap.
Ease Of Access: Room For Improvement
In the Gladiator, as in the Wrangler, the doors take an odd shape. They’re wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. For people and pets alike, this makes ingress a bit of a pain. The bootom of the door is maybe a foot wide, which is why Beorn struggled to get up into the Gladiator. You can see his foot catches on the door edge, something he never really got used to in our week with the car.
More than that, the Gladiator is tall. Off-road-y ones like this Willys boast larger tires, which adds height. The dog has hops, but even at his young age and with his NBA-like vertical, he struggled to get cleanly up into the cab. Similarly, exiting is a steep, trecherous affair even for tall dogs. It’s basically all the same problems in reverse.
Chase Bierenkoven
Chase Bierenkoven
Space: There’s Just Enough Of It
Once in, life gets easier for pets. The bench seat in the Gladiator is flat, if raked slightly upwards. The seat base in the Gladiator is also slightly more narrow than in other SUVs, which causes some problems with dogs that like to spread out in the back seat. There’s just not enough room for a dog to lie flat on the seats.
Dogs won’t have a wide, level space to lie on as a result, but it didn’t seem to bother my dog. The Gladiator’s boxy cabin guarantees headroom for even the largest of dogs, and you could potentially fit a passenger in back alongside the dog, too. As with so many trucks, the Gladiator’s manually-operated rear window also adds a bit of ventilation, especially when combined with the Gladiator’s removable roof panels.
Materials: Rugged Enough For Dogs
Perhaps predictably, the biggest upshot to life with a Gladiator, in this context at least, is the durability of the materials in the rear passenger space. That cheap-looking molded plastic isn’t going to break, and it’ll stand up to scratches well. The same can be said of this Gladiator’s cloth seats. While some trims offer leather, this is a similarly durable option that should stand up better to claws.
The rubberized floor mats are another upshot, adding some protectionon the floor in the event your dog isn’t exactly clean. The door sills are unprotected, but as they’re incredibly narrow, most dogs won’t get the chance to scratch them up – they’ll jump right over them.
While the Gladiator’s ingress and egress leave a lot to be desired, the space inside is both large and rugged enough to stand up to pets that don’t care about your resale value.
About the author
Chase Bierenkoven
Senior Editor, Autoblog