All of these things would appear in a review further forward in Autocar. The Avenger scored a three-and-a-half-star road test verdict, and my experiences over an extended period largely tally with that.
Like any car, it has good bits and bad bits; in the Jeep’s case, the really good bits are more good than the really bad ones are bad. I still like it and still enjoy driving it, and it appeals to my heart in a way that so few cars manage these days.
What about the Avenger as an ownership proposition? The more time I spent with it, the more issues it had and the more confidence in it I lost. Cars go wrong, yes, but the Avenger’s problems followed a pattern; they weren’t isolated. In the context of the issues experienced by our sister title What Car? while running their Avenger, it all points to a car with problems.
In the Jeep brand’s most recent appearance in the annual What Car? Reliability Survey, it came last. The Avenger has launched since as the first Jeep designed, engineered and built in Europe and for Europe, yet it seems to have inherited an unwelcome family trait from Jeeps built elsewhere in the world.
Problems started first in the hands of photographer Jack Harrison, who took the Avenger to the depths of Wales and experienced issues including the car failing to communicate with chargers and then the motor failing to start. Turning it off and back on again was a short-term fix, but a trip back to Jeep found no fault.
I escaped largely niggle-free, beyond the car being unable to charge at close to its maximum claimed speed, but the proverbial hit the fan one gloomy morning on the M25 when all the interior functions and displays died. It was scary for a moment, but everything came back to life before I reached the hard shoulder and the problem didn’t came back.
On its second return visit to Jeep, the incident again didn’t show up in the fault logs, so it was put down to a loose battery terminal. At this point, it was revealed the car was a pre-production example that didn’t have the latest software. An update was downloaded and installed.
But as I pondered last time, should the fact that the car was a pre-production example really matter? We test pre-production cars all the time, and one of their functions is to act as live testbeds for gremlins to be found and then fixed on finished models.
