America is getting a torquey diesel-powered Jeep Wrangler

By topgear, 17 November 2019

If you want to scale a sheer rock face, tow a train or plough through a boggy field, you don’t necessarily need infinite levels of power. What you really want is torque, and the best place to find that is in a whopping great diesel engine.

And so we say a warm welcome to the new (not-quite-whopping, but still rather large) 3.0-litre turbocharged EcoDiesel V6 that’s going in the Jeep Wrangler.

Unfortunately, this might be a US-only powertrain. Shame. Anyway, the headline figure is 600Nm of torque, which is fed to all four wheels (along with 260bhp) through an 8spd auto gearbox. Said gearbox has apparently been given more than 40 individual shift maps that can optimise changes for fuel economy, on-road performance or off-road capabilities. Impressive.

Jeep says the new power unit is both the most fuel-efficient and the highest torque-rated engine that has ever been fitted to a Wrangler. There are no l/100km figures as of yet, but it also reckons that the EcoDiesel will provide more range on a single tank than any other Wrangler, so you’ll be able to get even more lost in the wilderness than ever before. Plus, there are some clever engineering solutions to reduce emissions too. 

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