Are Jeeps poorly made?

Are Jeeps really made of poor quality and craftsmanship?

The question was asked by a friend who had bought a YJ that constantly broke down on him. We covered the YJ a bit in an earlier blog post. However as I just had my heater core replaced on my TJ (very expensive because the dash, seats, steering yoke had to be pulled), at 112k miles, it does seem Jeeps are not built that well.

A couple things to consider is that Jeeps are built in a modular way to easily strip down and convert to no doors, no roof or strip out the carpet quickly to remove water. So they are not built like normal cars.

The second and most important element to consider is they spend a lot of time on rough back roads that would destroy a normal car. Often the mileage will be low but the actual hours the motor ran is double what a car doing 60mph have on the motor. Gas mileage can't be measured in miles when the road is so rough it took you an hour to go two miles. Naturally the motor was running that entire hour though not much distance was covered.

If we are honest, as Jeep owners, we do admit that Jeeps are not really built well. Certainly they have improved over the years. But if you expect a Jeep to be like your car you are going to be very disappointed. You need to look at the Jeep as a specialized vehicle that takes amazing abuse, crawls in and out of impossible situations. But the plastic will break, the engine and transmission will not last long on the open highway (in comparison with cars) and break downs will happen.