2014 Jeep Cherokee first drive

This is the all-new, fifth-generation Jeep Cherokee, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the often square-cut and traditional 4x4s that went before it.

Instead it mixes Jeep styling motifs (a seven-vertical-slot grille, angular wheelarches) with fashionable design features such as no straight lines, concave surfaces and me-too trapezoidal tail-lights set on a slant.

The short bonnet and long front overhang betray the fact that it's derived from a transverse-engine, front-wheel drive platform with distant roots in Alfa Romeo's Alfa Romeo Giulietta.

It looks like a design student's proposal for a properly futuristic Jeep with a fast windscreen rake, a pointed ridge across the front grille and slender DRLs where you'd expect the headlights to be. But you know such a student would have toughened-up the look. As has Jeep, for the top Trailhawk version of which just 20 will arrive in the UK, despite being the visual lodestone of the range.

Why so few? Because as well as the full gamut of off-road, big wheel-articulation hardware denied to lesser Cherokees, it has a thirsty 3.2-litre petrol V6 which no-one will want to buy, despites its hunkier cladding, grey detailing and cutaway valances.

So the real-world, clean-clothes Cherokees come with Fiat's 2.0-litre Multijet II turbodiesel in 138 or 168bhp guises, matched in our test car to a nine-speed automatic gearbox.

You can have front-wheel or four-wheel drive, the latter automatically disconnecting and reconnecting drive to the rear wheels as needed to improve economy, as a Range Rover Evoque now does. Trim levels are Longitude or plusher Limited, and both aspire to a 'premiumness' that would make them rivals to an Audi Q5 or BMW X3 at a lower price.

Comfortable from the driver's seat. The cabin is much more of a quality job than in past Cherokees, with padded surfaces, no rattles or creaks, barely any wind noise and a decent sat-nav.

You sit in an authentically commanding driving position tailored by a multi-adjustable electrically powered seat, but the steering wheel's natural tilt is surprisingly far from the vertical. Fake wood inserts on the doors jar a bit, the glovebox is disappointingly small and those padded surfaces are just a touch too coarse and shiny to worry those Germans.

To drive, the Jeep feels like the tall but taut SUV it is. The steering (from the Alfa Romeo Giulietta) is much more accurate than a past Cherokee's, and the ride is mostly composed except for a choppiness over some ripples.

In 168bhp guise, driving all the wheels, the engine is subdued at speed and has adequate overtaking thrust, while the nine-speed auto shifts swiftly and unobtrusively.

There are no manual paddles but, should you fancy the futility of wading through all those ratios, you can tap the central selector back for up, forward for down. 

Curiously, the 138bhp engine is more vocal and more obviously dieselly, at least when mated to front-wheel drive and a manual gearbox, as in the version we sampled.

It's a lot more entertaining to drive as a manual, though, with enough of a direct connection between driver and powertrain to goad the chassis into a bit more interactivity. Unfortunately, in this form the activity extends to a livelier, bouncier ride.