BY ERIK JOHNSON
Simply put, diesels are awesome. We're such huge fans of diesels and their clattery goodness that we were beside ourselves with glee when Jeep announced last year that it planned to swipe the 3.0-liter turbo-diesel from the Mercedes powertrain lineup and stuff it into its Grand Cherokee SUV for 2007. After all, what vehicle wouldn't be better off with a little sparkless ignition in its life?
The 3.0-liter turbo-diesel in the Grand Cherokee CRD (for Common-Rail Diesel) is essentially the same engine found in such Mercedes-Benz products as the ML320 SUV and E320 sedan, apart from some extremely minor calibration tweaks. (We expect both the Grand Cherokee and the Mercedes diesels to adopt BlueTec clean-diesel technology to become 50-state compliant in the coming years. As of this writing, the diesels are not available in New York, California, Maine, Vermont, and Massachusetts.) In the Jeep, the 3.0-liter produces 215 horsepower at 3800 rpm and a whopping 376 pound-feet of torque at 2000 rpm, enough to pull a parade float full of beat-boxing Fat Boy impersonators to White Castle without breaking a sweat.
From the time the turbo's boost kicks in at 2000 rpm straight through to the 72-degree V-6's 4500-rpm redline, this Jeep just pulls and pulls and pulls until around 90 mph, at which point accelerating becomes hoping that another mph will tick off sometime before tomorrow. The engine is relatively quiet, though, sending little more than a hint of diesel clackity-clack to occupants' ears, even when your right foot unleashes as much twist as the pavement—and driveline components—can handle. But torque hardly equals flashy acceleration numbers, and that's the case here, as the CRD Cherokee managed just a 7.9-second 0-to-60-mph time (although any SUV that barks its front tires after a brake-torquing launch is all right by us) and covered the quarter-mile in a leisurely 16.2 seconds. These were, however, 0.2 second and 0.1 second quicker than the times posted by the ML320 CDI, which weighs 200 more pounds than the 4813-pound Cherokee.
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