From the January 2002 issue of Car and Driver.
Some people are just never meant to be rich. Charlie Steen was probably one of them. The Texan’s troubles began almost at the moment the slug of gray rock from his Mi Vida mine pegged the Geiger counter at Buddy Cowger’s gas station in Cisco, Utah.
It was July 18, 1952, a time when Americans believed they would soon be winging to work in uranium-powered saucers and baking meatloaf by the glow of the same fission keeping our enemies at bay. Weary of overpaying for South African uranium, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission was eager to find a domestic supply. Any miner who tapped a vein on the Colorado Plateau got $10,000 cash, plus $8 for every pound of high-grade ore in it. To sweeten the deal, government geologists combed the plateau and pointed prospectors toward promising sites. If a vein were discovered, the AEC would bulldoze a road through on the taxpayers’ nickel. The AEC’s dangled carrot and Steen’s discovery of the huge Mi Vida lode sparked the biggest mineral rush of the past century. Doctors, accountants, school teachers, and assorted opportunists dropped everything to head for Utah wielding nothing more than an AEC pamphlet on uranium prospecting and a store-bought Geiger counter.
By 1969, the nation’s uranium stocks were overflowing, but atomic saucers were in short supply. Steen’s fortune had disappeared into bad investments, lawsuits, and tax-fraud indictments, thousands of investors had been bilked with dubious claims, miners were dying of cancer, and the formerly pristine sandstone deserts of Utah were blotched with toxic mine tailings and scribbled with more than 900 miles of crude roads. The White Rim Road, a 100-mile billy-goat path of sand and slickrock built to service uranium dog holes on the 3000-foot-high Island in the Sky mesa about 350 miles west of Denver, is perhaps the best thing to come out of it all. It traces the bleached cliffs of the arrowhead-shaped mesa, overlooking the Colorado and Green rivers as they meander southward in vast gorges every bit as grand as the Grand Canyon. The two rivers converge at the pointy bottom of the mesa and head off for the craggy inlets of Lake Powell.
Jeepers, mountain bikers, and other worshippers of Kokopelli, the flute-tooting Hopi glyph that is the de facto god of desert stuff, have gravitated to the White Rim and the nearby town of Moab in the years since Pres. Lyndon Johnson dedicated Canyonlands National Park on September 12, 1964. Bring just $30 and the Park Service will sell you a permit to ride the White Rim, but come in a “high-clearance four-wheel-drive,” or you’ll be viewing Canyonland’s rocky chasms, skyscraping buttes, and wispy spires shoulder to shoulder with herds of slow-moving retirees at the park’s few paved overlooks. It so happens that the two most respected names in off-roading, Jeep and Land Rover, are launching new small four-wheel-drivers this year. That alone is not unique. What is: Jeep and Land Rover actually build the little utes for forays into the wild toolies, and going places you can’t get to in a BMW M5 is the best reason to buy a sport-utility, in our opinion.
Optioned correctly, the base Jeep Liberty Limited Edition and Land Rover Freelander price out to a wash, although our fully loaded (with no options) $32,220 Freelander HSE cost more than our fully loaded Liberty Limited Edition by $3435. Our plan was to compare the Liberty with the more popularly configured but not available for testing Freelander SE, which has a base price of $28,400 and lacks only the HSE’s power sunroof, the fancier Alpaca Beige leather, a Harman/Kardon stereo with six-CD changer and built-in navigation system, and 17-inch wheels.
All Freelanders, including the cloth-upholstered $25,600 Freelander S and the base leather-upholstered SE, have the same 174-hp, 2.5-liter V-6 mated to a five-speed automatic and viscous-coupled single-speed four-wheel-drive system. Suspension of the unitized body is by sturdy long-travel struts, and a thick aluminum skid plate keeps the engine safe from accidental mineral deposits.
The Jeep Liberty has a beefy cast-iron suspension built for boulder crawling. Our $28,785 Limited Edition was porked up with the $2945 Customer Preferred package, including leather seats, power everything, premium stereo, and the Selec-Trac two-speed four-wheel-drive system with an “auto” setting and low-range gear. Another $700 went for the sunroof, $600 for ABS, $520 for the Off-Road Group (including a limited-slip rear diff, larger tires, various skid plates, tow hooks, and cooling upgrades), $415 for a trunk-mounted CD changer, $390 for supplemental side airbags, $250 for heated seats, $245 for a towing package, and $40 for an engine-block heater. Stripped of nonessential frills (the $2445 Sport Value Group with air conditioning we feel is essential), our Limited’s White Rim badge could be earned with a Liberty Sport for as little as $23,650. Oh, and don’t forget the 30 bucks for the permit.
Second Place: Jeep Liberty Limited Edition
Steen discovered the Mi Vida in an Army-surplus Jeep and would likely find little to fault in the 21st-century model we wheeled onto the plateau.
The front-end styling is straight from the Army manual, and with its cast-iron, independent-front control arms, rigid rear axle, stiff coil springs, and two-speed transfer case, the Liberty is built with such a deep reserve of off-road capability that it’s hard to imagine the typical owner ever tapping it. We didn’t, and we drove up and down the Murphy Hogback, a 1.3-mile cattle trail on the White Rim first cut into the cliffs during World War I by the Murphy brothers.
The Jeep charged along as if it were the reigning stag in the neighborhood. Body flexing was undetectable even as the suspension twisted and strained, the Matterhorn approach and departure angles (38.0 and 32.3 degrees, respectively) kept the ends aloft, and the big Goodyears ripped into the trail like bear claws.
Just 7.8 inches separates the Liberty’s lowest point from the rock, but the taut suspension leverages the truck’s ground clearance better than that of more softly sprung utes, including the Freelander. The transfer case’s 2.72:1 low gear was much appreciated on the long downhill, although the hand-brake-style shifter refused to pass smoothly through the dogleg between neutral and low.
The Liberty’s seats were also voted off the Island. The front-bottom cushions were found too short and lacking in thigh support, the rears were relatively cramped and inhospitable. “My fanny’s aching after only a half-hour,” complained one adventurer.
That and the squeeze on footroom due to the transmission tunnel were the biggest gripes about an interior that looks more appropriate to a sports car. Even under the steadily thickening film of red dust, the Limited’s electroplated plastic shimmered elegantly and the trim materials were praised as being of high quality and pleasing to the touch. The huge elliptical door handles were one detail winning particular praise.
The Liberty’s off-road ability comes at the price of comfort, however. Every rock outcropping, slickrock shelf, and vee-shaped wash in the trail pummeled the truck like a small Semtex charge. On the highway the Jeep bounced and shuddered noticeably more than the Freelander with the kind of stiff-legged gambol one equates with an empty pickup.
All the ferrous metal, including the cast-iron engine block, contributes mass that impedes the 4304-pound Liberty’s performance. From 70 mph, the Liberty rolled 209 feet under full braking, 20 more than the Freelander. And with the big 3.7-liter SOHC 12-valve V-6 burning maximum gas, this Liberty needed 10.0 seconds to register 60 mph, just 0.2 second better than the 174-hp–and 623 pounds lighter–Freelander. Our first test of a Liberty Limited ( C/D, August 2001) saw 60 mph flash by in 8.8 seconds, and the discrepancy is explainable only with a guess, such as this later-production example perhaps suffered from a tighter engine.
Passing with the Jeep requires forward thinking as the 45RFE four-speed auto pauses for deep breaths before downshifting. The power-to-weight ratio does favor the Liberty over the Freelander, but we’re still disappointed that DaimlerChrysler let the new Jeep’s weight balloon up. The extra pounds don’t pay a dividend anywhere except in off-road athleticism most drivers will never use. Perhaps the Liberty’s designers believed more owners would be like Steen and make their own roads.
2002 Jeep Liberty Limited Edition
210-hp V-6, 4-speed automatic, 4304 lb
Base/as-tested price: $23,305/$28,785
C/D TEST RESULTS
60 mph: 10.0 sec
1/4 mile: 17.5 @ 81 mph
Braking, 70–0 mph: 209 ft
Roadholding, 300-ft-dia skidpad: 0.70 g
C/D observed fuel economy: 16 mpg
First Place: Land Rover Freelander HSE
“Looks kinda low,” opined Canyonlands ranger Alyssa Van Schmus as she peered at the Land Rover with professional skepticism. Behind her was the decidedly not-low Dodge Ram four-by-four the government gives her for rescuing tourists and towing out underachieving rental cars.
We had just hobbled down a rock-strewn spur of the White Rim called the Lathrop Trail to flush the granules from between our toes in the latte-colored Colorado River. Van Schmus and helper Roy Vaughan were there, hacking back the tamarisk in 90-degree heat. It’s a leafy shrub from Asia that arrived with settlers at the turn of the past century. Today it lines every inch of the river like overgrown slivers of Vietnamese jungle.
Yes, the Freelander is a Lotus Esprit compared with the Discovery and other Land Rovers. The nose, the lowest part at 7.2 inches, is actually 0.1 inch closer to the planet than a Subaru Outback’s. The 225/55HR-17 Pirelli Scorpions (regular-production models will wear Michelins) leave precious little sidewall for the fancy aluminum rims to hide behind, and the muffler only half-tucked under the rear bumper (see below) seems particularly vulnerable.
But by the time the 10-megawatt moon was rising over our first campsite, it was clear which vehicle the crew preferred to plant their buns in. Obstacles that tossed heads in the Liberty resulted in little more than an audible psst! from the Freelander’s dampers. The pampering ride allowed White Rim pilots to regularly cruise at higher speeds, leaving the Jeep in a roostertail of red dust.
The Freelander also needs more snap-to from under the hood. Midland Powertrain, a subsidiary of the newly independent MG-Rover group, builds the aluminum 2.5-liter DOHC 24-valve V-6 to make its 174 horsepower and 177 pound-feet of torque as smooth as Cotswold cream. However, throttle response is lazy, and on the highway, the engine struggles to maintain speed going up hills. Downshifts are reluctant unless the five-speed auto is in its sport setting or the driver personally selects a lower gear using the handy manumatic feature. At least there’s the thriftier fuel economy: 19 mpg versus the Liberty’s 16 mpg on our trip.
“Economy” also applies to the dash materials, which some felt were a bit cheap (or “durable,” depending on which logbook page is being consulted), and the omission of armrests is outrageous. Otherwise, the Freelander’s more complicated cockpit mostly worked for us. On paper, the Rover has a much smaller cargo capacity than does the Jeep, but the front seats suspend the body with better technique and the back bench is roomier. The cabin is more conveniently accessed across the lower side sill and through the one-piece rear door, and the rubber mats seem more suited to the off-road lifestyle. Special accolades go to the thick-rimmed steering wheel around which the palms snug comfortably, and to the occasional faint oil odor detected through the air vents without which no British vehicle would be complete.
If the canyons of Utah are calling, the Freelander SE is a more prudent pack mule than the pricier HSE with its incomprehensible navigation system. Steen probably would have thought so, too, but then, look what happened to him.
2002 Land Rover Freelander HSE
174-hp V-6, 5-speed automatic, 3681 lb
Base/as-tested price: $32,220/$32,220
C/D TEST RESULTS
60 mph: 10.2 sec
1/4 mile: 17.8 @ 79 mph
Braking, 70–0 mph: 189 ft
Roadholding, 300-ft-dia skidpad: 0.71 g
C/D observed fuel economy: 19 mpg
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Source: Reviews - aranddriver.com
