2008-06-21 10:11:26
Like me, Susan drives back and forth through the Columbia River Gorge to Portland a lot, and it's often windy and gusty. Add a 30-mph gust to 65 or 70 mph, and you have some real stress on things like hood hinges.
Chrysler has an exceptional wind tunnel at their beautiful facility in Michigan, just north of Detroit. I wonder what sort of wind tunnel tests the Patriot was given, before production?
I'll ask my PR guy there, who is one of the best I know--he understands cars, and he's always straight. Good PR guys like that are important. Chrysler has always had great PR people, experienced and knowledgeable.
Susan's Patriot is a beautiful bronze, and has the strong 4-cylinder Mitsubishi engine and 5-speed manual transmission, as I urged her to get (the CVT simply feels too weird). She says she gets 27 mpg with cruise control set at 68 mph, running over a few long hills in the Cascade Mountain range between here and Portland. It wasn't easy to find a Patriot with that engine and transmission in one of two colors she liked--the nearest dealer with her car was in Boise, Idaho.
The hood hinges on Susan's Patriot allow a lot of flex. They're not loose at their bolts or rivets, and they don't look bent, but you can move her hood up and down, nearly half at inch at all the corners. She's not alone; she has a friend with a Patriot whose hood does the same, and she’s been to a forum on jeep.com, where they call it Flapping Hood. Driving in the windy Gorge, she says it scares her--the hood pushes up with a whoomph and shakes like it's trying to fly off.
There are two YouTube videos showing the flap; some guy in England giving a standing demonstration, http://uk.youtube.com/user/Simm312, and another shot through a moving windshield, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtZCczp8UaM although you have to look real close to see the alleged shake on that video. Most of the shaking might be in the hands of that angry youtuber, who called the fit and finish of the Jeep "hideous" and "absolutely unacceptable." Those are stronger words than an automotive journalist would use, that's for sure.
I took a couple pictures of the gaps at the seams of the hood on Susan's Patriot, but they came out fuzzy. So here's a picture I took the same day, that turned out better. The full moon is setting in the south at daybreak, near Mount Hood. Taken out the window of my loft office.
When Susan reported the problem to her dealer in Boise, the service department gave her an 800 number that they said was in Detroit. Susan reached a customer service person in India, who looked up in his book what to do, and it said to call her dealer in Boise. A perfect, tight, runaround, halfway around the world.
She called her dealer back, and they said: Oh, we didn't know the calls went to India.
I suggested to Susan that she pursue the issue with a more local Jeep dealer, and do not let them dismiss you because you're a woman. Meanwhile, she might just have to hold down the hood with a big bungee cord. After all, some cars actually have leather hood straps. You have to go back to England in the '50s to find them ... but the technology is sound, can't deny that. Lots of technologies still work. Throwing rocks at your enemy's head still works, for example.
If I owned Susan's Patriot, I’d make a big brown leather strap to run across the hood. Attach it with chrome pins, like the aluminum hood on my Oldsmobile racecar, with the big Bandit logo on it. Or wait--I'd show the flawed hinge design to Curtis, the fabricator at Jim Estes' Garage, whom, as we speak, is re-mounting the engine in the Bandit, lowering it by two inches. I think I'll suggest to Susan that she take her Jeep there. This is the kind of problem racers solve all the time. We'll fix it, and then show Jeep what we've done.
Still ... a brown leather belt would go good with the bronze Jeep.
Come to think of it, I'm surprised Land Rover doesn't offer a leather hood strap, just for image. A true accessory. They could make it a $500 option.
End
Sam Moses
Previous Blogs:
Sexy, Gorgeous, Passionate, Maserati
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