Colorado junkyards are good places to find interesting Subarus, as I’ve learned after 15 years of living in the Centennial State. The Jeep XJ Cherokee was as popular as any Subaru model here, so those same yards also serve as comprehensive XJ museums. Here’s one of the very last XJs built in the United States, and its steering wheel is on the right side.
The XJ was the product of the French government’s bailout of AMC, masterminded by Renault’s brilliant François Castaing and built from the 1984 through 2001 model years.
It’s rare to walk into a self-service boneyard along the I-25 corridor between Colorado Springs and Cheyenne and not find at least one XJ, nearly a quarter-century after they stopped being built (at the time of this writing, for example, U-Pull-&-Pay shows ten XJs in their three Colorado stores). Just yesterday, I found this rare rear-wheel-drive/two-door ’90 at Colorado Auto & Parts, one of five XJs currently in stock there.
The ZJ Grand Cherokee, which debuted as a 1993 model, was supposed to be the XJ’s replacement. However, the XJ sold so well that Chrysler and then DaimlerChrysler just kept on building it for nearly another decade. This wasn’t quite as impressive as the Volvo 240 outlasting its supposed replacement, but still shows how beloved the XJ became.
The very last XJ built in North America rolled off the Toledo line in June of 2001. This truck was built two months before that, making it the latest XJ I’ve ever documented in a car graveyard. XJ production continued in China, in both licensed and pirated forms, for… well, nobody is quite sure. Let’s call it late 2010s and we won’t be too far off.
I shot this truck in Colorado Springs in early July (that’s Pikes Peak in the distance behind this row of Jeeps), and I regret to inform you that it has been crushed by now. I can’t always write about every doomed vehicle before it gets eaten by The Crusher.
This is the third discarded RHD XJ Cherokee I’ve written about, after a Japanese-market ’95 in Colorado and a VM Motori diesel-powered European-market ’96 near Sherwood Forest.
The ’95 was a truck that was built in the United States for the Japanese market and then shipped back across the Pacific, presumably for use as a rural mail-delivery vehicle. Today’s XJ, though, was sold new in the United States.
The Jeep DJ Dispatcher was the most iconic “mail Jeep,” but you can still buy a new Jeep intended for mail delivery in rural America to this day.
Today’s XJ was built with an electronic odometer and I couldn’t get the final mileage (which I think could have rivaled the 431k-mile, non-JDM RHD Subaru Legacy wagon I had just shot in Denver).
So, I went back a few weeks later to pull a Fox T-Bird gas filler neck for Sajeev Mehta and to hook up a 12V battery pack to the XJ’s instrument cluster and try to get an odometer reading (allegedly, the mileage data are stored in the cluster and not the ECM in an XJ)… and someone had already bought the cluster. At least Sajeev got the parts for his beloved Valentino Edition Continental.
Only one engine was available in the final-year XJ for the US market: the 4.0-liter AMC straight-six, rated at 193 horsepower and 231 pound-feet. European XJ shoppers could still get the Italian oil-burner that year.
This truck has an automatic transmission and Command-Trac four-wheel-drive, which has no center differential and requires that the driver select two-wheel-drive for use on dry pavement.
It’s got nasty rust around the rear wheel openings. Perhaps it moved here from the Midwest, or maybe it delivered mail (and parked) in snow high up in the mountains.
2001 Jeep Cherokee RHD in Colorado junkyard.
2001 Jeep Cherokee RHD in Colorado junkyard.
2001 Jeep Cherokee RHD in Colorado junkyard.
2001 Jeep Cherokee RHD in Colorado junkyard.
2001 Jeep Cherokee RHD in Colorado junkyard.
2001 Jeep Cherokee RHD in Colorado junkyard.
2001 Jeep Cherokee RHD in Colorado junkyard.
2001 Jeep Cherokee RHD in Colorado junkyard.
2001 Jeep Cherokee RHD in Colorado junkyard.
2001 Jeep Cherokee RHD in Colorado junkyard.
2001 Jeep Cherokee RHD in Colorado junkyard.
2001 Jeep Cherokee RHD in Colorado junkyard.
2001 Jeep Cherokee RHD in Colorado junkyard.
2001 Jeep Cherokee RHD in Colorado junkyard.
2001 Jeep Cherokee RHD in Colorado junkyard.
[Images: The Author]
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