What's everyone's opinion on the jl Rubicon 4dr?
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We love ours. In my opinion, the biggest upgrade over the JK is the 8-speed ZF transmission. Ours has the 3.6L Pentastar motor like the later model JKs but this new transmission makes it feel like a completely different vehicle. It’s actually got some spunk and is fun to drive. One other benefit that the transmission provides is no need to regear if you up your tire size. Most of the JK owners on here will tell you that they had considerable loss of power when moving tire size to 35s and definitely 37s and needed to regear to make it bearable on the road. Mine is still on the stock 33s so I can’t speak personally but have seen many reports that guys running 37s are very happy and say that although they rarely see 8th gear anymore, they dont notice anything different in the road habits. These have all been Rubicons with the stock 4.10 axle gearing.
Some other items to note:
Magnesium rear swing gate: supposedly stronger.
Aluminum doors are lighter.
Rubicon’s have different which essentially end up being 2” higher than that of the Sport and Sahara models. THE Rubicon fenders are inline with the hood and the Sahara/Sports have 2” of metal fender between the hood and the flare.
Rubicons can run 35” tires stock, no lift, and can put a 35” spare on the tailgate with no mods.
Can run 37s with 2” -2.5” lift. Can put a 37” on the stock tailgate with a relocation bracket to move the tire up so that it clears the rear bumper.
Rubicons also have 2-piece fender flares where you can remove the bottom portion for a little more clearance. This is what a lot of guys are doing with 2.5” of lift and fitting 38s or 40s. It appears that this was Jeeps shoutout to the JK fender hack mod. This appears to be a little cleaner than some of the JK Dremel work that I’ve seen.
NO CD PLAYER. 😳 lol
The UConnect 4C with the 8.4” screen is actually pretty sweet once you get to know the system. I can pull up live weather/radar and forecasts directly from UConnect and not even using my phone.
Apple Carplay works pretty well. There’s videos out there that will teach you how to get all the apps from your phone to appear on the screen instead of only the Apple or Google-approved ones. So if you prefer Waze to the Uconnect/GPS maps, you can get those on there.
The stock Rubicon axles have a few upgrades over the JK version. The “next generation 44s” on the Rubicons are noted as Dana M210 (Front) and Dana M210 (rear). They have thicker tubes, beef’d up steering linkage, re-worked gearing which results in the teeth of the pinion gears being shorter and stronger, and the axles are 2.5” wider than the JK 44s.
Axle Widths:
JLR = 68”
JLS/S = 66.5”
JKS/S/R = 65.5”