If you've never owned or driven a Wrangler, you might think it's twitchy and choppy, and it is indeed twitchier and choppier than almost anything else on the road. But it's a relative thing. Compared to a '92 Wrangler, the current model feels like a luxury liner.

Compared to the last-generation Wrangler, the wheelbase has been increased by 2 inches and the track by 3.4 inches; the chassis has been stiffened and the suspension redesigned. All these things yield significant improvements in the ride and handling, but still, on city streets, the Wrangler is pretty bouncy, and out on the freeway it can feel squiggly over pavement changes. The driver needs to pay attention to keep the Wrangler going in a straight line.

That said, we drove the Wrangler at speeds up to 85 miles per hour on the open freeway, and it was stable and surprisingly quiet, when the pavement was smooth. When it was even slightly rough, we had to move into the smoother passing lane to find comfort.

However, it's important to note that our Sahara had the 18-inch wheels with Bridgestone Dueler on/off-road tires and high-pressure gas-charged shock absorbers. Standard on the Sahara are 18-inch Goodyear Wrangler SRA on/off-road tires with those shocks. The Wrangler X uses 16-inch Goodyear Wrangler STs, also on/off-road, but the shocks are low-pressure, so that combination might offer the best ride, with the standard Sahara setup somewhere in between the two.

The 3.8-liter V6 that comes standard on all Wranglers is an overhead valve engine. It makes 202 horsepower (205 in the Unlimited) and 232 pound-feet of torque (240 in the Unlimited) at 4000 rpm.

Acceleration is good, but on those long uphill 75-mph grades between Lake Tahoe and San Francisco, the Jeep kept kicking down out of overdrive, fourth gear, until we turned the overdrive off (our Sahara was equipped with the Trailer Tow Group option). More torque at lower rpm might have prevented this. We didn't have the opportunity to test the standard six-speed manual transmission, but we're inclined to suggest it might be more compatible with the Jeep than this four-speed automatic.

The Wrangler Unlimited would have been a different animal on this road. The ride is significantly smoother and the handling more stable, thanks to a wheelbase that's 20.6 inches longer. The Unlimited also weighs 315 pounds more, so the engine will work a bit harder. However, all 4WD Wranglers are EPA-rated at 15 city and 19 highway miles per gallon.

When we drove the Unlimited around Lake Tahoe, there were a lot of other Jeeps on the road, and our four-door never failed to turn heads. At the view points, fellow Jeepsters came over to ogle and marvel. Every one of them said they wanted to go home and trade in their two-door on the new four-door Jeep.

We were also behind the wheel of an Unlimited with the six-speed manual transmission on the rugged Rubicon Trail, where its capability was downright dazzling; in low range and first gear on the most challenging sections, we drove without using our feet: merely steering over daunting obstacles, and letting the vehicle do the rest. It's safe to say that the two-door Wrangler would be fairly astonishing.

The only limitation with the Unlimited was its turning radius of 41.2 feet versus 34.9 feet with the two-door. Six feet is a big difference. In San Francisco, we used the two-door's tight turning radius to make a U-turn in the middle of a street to snatch a parking space on the other side.

© 2008 NewCarTestDrive.com