JEEP GRAND CHEROKEE

Can the American SUV brand's new flagship mix it with the plug-in hybrid big guns?

- ILLYA VERPRAET

There's a new luxury plug-in hybrid SUV with a low-range gearbox and genuine off-road capability available in the UK, and it's not a Land Rover Defender. No, what we have here is the Jeep Cherokee 4xe. '4xe' is pronounced 'four by ee', by the way. Obviously.

If you think about it rationally, it's a fairly absurd concept. Who habitually needs to scale nearvertical slopes but also wants to do it in a plushly trimmed, 4.9m-long, 2.15m-wide behemoth? Oh, and it needs to be able to do some miles on electric power so the company car tax bill isn't too high.

The Grand Cherokee ticks all of those boxes, but if you're never going to use its somewhat rarefied capabilities, it looks rather shakier as a proposition.