This straight-six engine was rated at 190 horsepower and 225 pound-feet the Explorer's Cologne V6 made 145 horses and 220 pound-feet that year. Its new Jeep rival had a 4.0-liter pushrod six-cylinder with ancestry stretching all the way back to the middle 1960s as well, though Chrysler's good old 318-cubic-inch (5.2-liter) V8 was available as an option. In 1993, the Ford Explorer had but a single engine available: a 4.0-liter pushrod six-cylinder with ancestry stretching all the way back to the middle 1960s. The Grand Cherokee's debut at the 1992 Detroit Auto Show, in which Bob Lutz drove it up Cobo Hall's front steps and through a big plate-glass window, made a strong impression. No, what he really wanted was the Jeep brand and especially the design that became this truck (Chrysler also scored big in that deal by getting the Eagle Premier, which included the Renault-derived suspension design that went under the big-selling Chrysler LH cars of the 1990s and 2000s, as well as the design of the AMC engine that became the PowerTech 4.7 V8). Lee Iacocca didn't have Chrysler buy American Motors because he wanted to build Renault Alliances or AMC Concords. 30 years later, Stellantis is now building the fifth generation of the Grand Cherokee. The Grand Cherokee had a wheelbase four inches longer than that of the XJ Cherokee (which, though a bit cramped by later SUV standards, was so beloved that production continued into our current century), and the '93 scaled in at 3,547 pounds versus 2,850 pounds for the '93 four-door 4x4 XJ. Here's one of those first-year Grand Cherokees, found in a Colorado wrecking yard last fall. Even before Chrysler bought AMC in 1987, a snazzier successor to the Cherokee was being cooked up in Kenosha it debuted in the 1993 model year and was an instant sales success. Ford responded with the Explorer SUV for 1991, and suddenly commuter trucks were everywhere. Jeep, then part of the American Motors Corporation, introduced the unibody XJ Cherokee for the 1984 model year, and suddenly there was a tough-looking truck that drove like a car and got much better fuel economy than the rest of the truck world.
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