A St Patrick's Day Jeep Showdown: Former Fancy Pants Orvis Jeep vs. the Jeep Grand Cherokee Overland

For the St. Patrick's day post, I decided yesterday while I was doing some Sunday car shopping at the Ford dealership, that today's featured automobile would be the first green vehicle that caught my eye...  I do this begrudgingly.  I work tonight, and this particular holiday makes my job miserable and full of belligerent drunk people with horrible decision making skills and very little self control...  I have no Irish heritage myself.  Actually, the entire notion of ancestry and heritage seems ridiculous to me.  By and large, my ancestry traces back to Germany, with some smidgen of French and Serbian thrown in for fun.  More than German, I consider myself a generic Midwesterner, having lived my life between Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, and Nebraska.  I am German insofar as I like a good beer (not that I can really have one anymore thanks to the whole gluten thing) and once considered buying a Volkwagen.  And so, when people make a big deal out of their Irish heritage, or whatever heritage they identify with, it seems silly to me, because I've never felt the need to extend my roots down into the past and try to own some previous generation's life experiences as my own, because they are not my own, nor even my past's... they're just earlier chapters in a bloodline that only have bearing on my life now if I insist that they must. None the less, it's St Patrick's day, which means that the green beer will be flowing, and so, a green car is fitting.

*some cookies I spotted at the store.  I can't have them because of gluten content, but they don't look all that appetizing anyway, so no big loss.

Now, to the task at hand.  I chose the Ford dealership because I'm trying to decide what model I’m going to take out for a test drive to score a $50 gift certificate from the auto show promotion -I’m open to suggestions from readers, by the way… keep in mind, I’ve already covered the Mustang, the Taurus SHO, the Fiesta ST, the Focus ST, the Fusion, and the F150 with the 3.5L Ecoboost- when I spotted today’s vehicle looking battered and forlorn in the fresh trade row.  Because the last post dealt with an old Jeep and a new Jeep, it seemed like good follow up to feature yet another old jeep, and contrast that with a new one.

Here’s our sad little friend from the fresh trade row:  a 1997 Jeep Grand Cherokee Orvis edition.  That model year puts this vehicle at the tail end of the 1st generation of Grand Cherokees.  2nd generation began with 1999 models.

What you’re seeing is a real fall from grace for a vehicle that was pretty much at the top of its heap for trim and options back when it was new.  This poor old rig has been knocked around, trashed, and thrashed.  Over its years and through however many people owned it, somewhere along the line, somebody stopped caring about this vehicle and its preservation.  … Maybe not entirely, though.  Somebody did care enough to fix the damage to the front bumper -they just didn’t care enough to do the repair correctly.  Let me show you with a little zoom here.

See that?  It’s scraps of sheet metal that have been screwed in place with full bearing head screws.  It could be worse, though.  They could have used pop rivets or duct tape, or they could have just let the front end hang off the vehicle after the damage until it fell off all on its own.  There was some effort made to match the contours and planes, but still, this looks terrible!  Back when this Jeep was brand new, nobody ever would have dreamed of doing such a lick ‘em-stick ‘em repair job on it.  By God, this is an Orvis edition! And in 1997, it was an expensive Jeep.

Orvis is a trim package that one could add on top of the Limited package, which is like extra goodies on top of an already well equipped vehicle.  It's named after a retail company that sells expensive hunting and fishing stuff to well-to-do outdoorsy types, or at least people who like to fancy themselves outdoorsy types from the safety of their fancier-yet SUVs -you know, the kind of folks who gear up for traipsing around in the woods by purchasing a $100 pair of khaki pants in which to do so -I imagine them wearing loafers, too, even though I'm sure Orvis would happily sell them some pricey hiking boots that would better fit the bill.   Well, anyway...  In 1997, the base MSRP for a Grand Cherokee Limited was just under $31,000.  The Orvis upgrade added to that amount, and upgrading to a 4x4 instead of 4x2 version bumped it higher yet.  Add on a few more extras, like, say, an engine block heater or what have you, and I estimate we’ll settle in at around $34,000 for our ‘97 Grand Cherokee Orvis -and that‘s in 1997 dollars, by the way.

The Orvis package was typically offered in Moss Green paint like the one we’re looking at today, though a very few of them were made in a tan color called “Light Driftwood“.  You could request one with the 4.0L I6 engine we talked about in our last post, but the standard offering on an Orvis edition was the 5.2L V8 with 220 HP and 300 lb-ft of torque partnered with a 4 speed automatic transmission.  The 4X4 system was known as Quadra-trac, and it automatically engaged the front wheels to drive via a viscous coupling unit when it detected slippage.   With this set up, one could expect to get 14/17 mpg.  The Orvis also came with tow hooks and an upgraded suspension kit as well as Roan Red pin striping.

The interior featured 2 tone leather seats done in green and tan with Roan Red piping.  This one we’re looking at today is one of just 2,733 Orvis editions made in 1997.

What’s the equivalent in today’s Jeep lineup?  The good news is that Jeep has maintained this particular model uninterrupted since its debut, though now on its 5th generation (there have been mild updates and tweaks within each generation, but we’re dividing generations by major redesigns).  These days, the trim levels on the Grand Cherokee stack up like this:
(keep in mind these are base MSRPs for what are typically 4x2 models)
Laredo -$29.195
Laredo E -$30,795
Limited -$36,195
Overland -$43,195
Summit -$48,195
SRT -$63,995

Because the Orvis was a step up from the Limited in 1997, today’s equivalent should be the Overland edition.  We’ll start there and see how things stack up.  The Overland edition features all the stuff that you’d get on a Limited Grand Cherokee, plus Quadralift air suspension, bi-xenon headlights with LED daytime running lights, Nappa leather trimmed seats, a leather stitched instrument panel, door inserts, and center consol armrest, heated steering wheel, navigation with touch screen, power folding mirrors, power tilt/telescoping steering wheel, dual pane sunroof, Overland Grille (which doesn’t look very different from the standard grille), chrome tow hooks, color keyed wheel lips, fascia, and sills with chrome insert.  Under the hood is a 3.6L V6  with an output of 290 HP and 260 lb-ft of torque.  There are some upgrades available for the power plant -but they’ll cost ya’.

For an extra $4,500, you can get a 3.0L EcoDiesel V6 that can power the Grand Cherokee with 240 HP and 420 lb-ft of torque while attaining 30 MPG highway.  I played around on the Jeep website and found that adding this option also saddled me with another $895 for the Uconnect system with navigation -or at least it did on the Overland edition I played around and built.  So, we might as well chalk it up at $5,395 for that diesel option.

An additional $3,195 will get you a 5.7L V8 Hemi with 360 HP and 390 lb-ft of torque, though I’m sure it can’t come anywhere near the MPGs that the diesel can achieve.

And then there’s the 6.4L V8 SRT Hemi -available in the Grand Cherokee lineup only in the SRT, which has a base MSRP of $63,995.  That’s a lot of money, but at least it gets you a lot of power…  470 HP and 465 lb-ft of torque, to be exact.  

Earlier, we estimated that in 1997, a 4x4 Jeep Grand Cherokee Orvis edition carried an MSRP of around $34,000.  Once again, using our nifty online inflation converter, that amount is equal to $49,562 in 2013 dollars.  Setting that as our price goal, let’s see just how much Jeep Grand Cherokee we can build in 2014.

We’ll start with an Overland edition 4x4, which already has us up to $46,195, but for some reason, the net price showing on the building page of the Jeep site differs from this and reads as $47,190 before I've even added anything to it.   I wonder what that’s about?  Well, we like fuzzy-wuzzy things here on Automozeal.

 ....even when those things are math instead of my fuzzy pup, Pavlov, so I guess we’ll just deal with it.  For the record, though, I think there should be an extra $995 in there for us to kick around.

Due to St Patrick's day, and in honor of the Moss Green paint on the Orvis, our Overland is going to be Black Forest Green Pearl Coat.  For some contrast, we’ll select Nepal Jeep Brown Light Frost for our interior color, though Morocco Black would probably also look nice.  We’re still at $47,190...  Until we get to options.

We don’t have enough wiggle room between our current price and the inflation adjusted 1997 Orvis price of $49,562 to upgrade our engine, so we’re going to have to be happy with the  3.6L V6, which actually has 70 more HP than the ‘97 Orvis’ 5.2L V8, though 40 less lb-ft of torque.

If we stick with the Jeep website’s math, we've only got $2,372 left to play with before we reach the maximum we’re letting ourselves build to ($3,367 if we pitch a fit about that missing $995).  For $1,995, we can get the Advanced Technology Group, which has adaptive cruise control with stop, advanced brake assist, blind spot and rear cross path detection, forward collision warning and crash mitigation.  That sounds pretty good, so why not?  We’re now at $49,185 (or, $33,740 in 1997 dollars).  That’s pretty close, and we can call it good there, I think.  Our hypothetical build Jeep is so loaded up already that the list of features takes up several pages when I expand it to view all on the Jeep website.

I’m sure it’s lovely and whatnot, and I know plenty of people are delighted with their Grand Cherokees, but even after this little exercise, I’d rather have the new Cherokee Trailhawk I built in the last post.