2007 Jeep Patriot Preview

This is what a Jeep should look like! As good as the Jeep Compass looked in the early sketches and then, souped up pre-production tuner influenced duds, it lost much of its appeal as an anti-Jeep (in my eyes at least) when it showed up at Detroit with slinky chrome wheels (as opposed to the black and satin 19-inchers from the previous concept) and a droopy, sad-sack face with pin-prick fog lamps pushed down into bumpers that look like nothing so much as jowls; not to mention it's not Trail Rated. It's a great idea for the Jeep brand to branch out and give people reasonable (read: city-slicker) options, but with the Caliber picking up the slack at the very lowest end of the price bracket for Chrysler Group, I personally think the end product should have maintained a more aggressive identity and kept the Compass looking street-race ready. Caliber, Compass, and now Patriot all share the same super platform engineered in collaboration with Mitsubishi, and despite Chrysler Group displaying great mastery of brand engineering with the LX cars (300, Charger, Magnum... Challenger?), it seems like Compass has lost its direction (not to mention design focus).