Jeep Wrangler Rubicon 392 2021 UK first drive

You might well wonder why Jeep chose 2021 to launch its first headbanging, V8-engined Jeep Wrangler in more than three decades.

Today’s airwaves brim with debate about how best to reduce our carbon footprints, and Jeep already toes the environmental line to some extent: it currently offers a Wrangler plug-in hybrid, with a four-pot engine and 20 or so miles of electric range, and a Wrangler EV is expected to arrive soon. So surely the whole big-boned V8 thing is just a little passé?

Perhaps. But sometimes one needs to discard the gloves, and for Jeep that meant announcing the flagship Wrangler Rubicon 392 (that number being 6.4 litres in cubic inches) on the same morning last year that Ford revealed its reinvented Bronco.

This wasn’t so much stealing the limelight as declaring war, and you can see why. The Bronco comes in trim levels with names like Big Bend and Badlands. It’s characterful and capable, and the factory is lining up a fruity V6-engined Raptor variant.

In short, the new Ford is the biggest commercial threat that the modern Wrangler has yet faced, and that’s why the Rubicon 392 is here – not to sell in big volumes but just to remind us that when it comes to cartoonishly likeable and phenomenally tough off-roaders, nobody does it like Jeep.

The 392 is quite the showpiece. That mammoth engine is the same naturally aspirated Hemi unit found in the Dodge Challenger R/T Scat Pack, making 470bhp and 470lb ft. It sounds gravelly and archaic, rather than woofly and smooth like the twin-turbocharged V8s we get here in Europe, but it seriously bombastic (yes, there's even a sports exhaust) and exciting and it certainly gets the job done, firing the heavy Rubicon 392 to 60mph in less than 5.0sec.

Top speed is limited to 99mph to protect the all-terrain tyres, although in truth the main benefit of the V8 over the standard four- and six-cylinder engines is its throttle response and torque output during recreational crawl-speed off-roading. 

The engine is mated to an automatic eight-speed gearbox and, as in any other Rubicon, you have the ability to lock the differentials and disconnect the front anti-roll bar for extra suspension travel on the boulder fields these cars seem to love.

It’s a toy, the 392, but a very serious one, and on British country lanes you never quite shake the subliminal desire to suddenly turn hard left, vault the ditch, put a perfectly square-shaped hole in the hedgerow and then go full-throttle across the fields, V8 roaring and the tyres launching rooster-trails of mud and grass in your wake. And I'm sure the car would do just that.