SINGAPORE – What an alarming car the Jeep Grand Cherokee Summit is. By which I mean it seems on constant alert to warn you about impending disaster.

Example: When you’re on board the Grand Cherokee and pull up a little too close to the car in front of you, your ears are bombarded by a series of beeps that admonish you for tailgating. Or if the blind spot monitor detects a car in the next lane, and you signal because you’re going for a gap, you get another sonic scolding, even if that gap is perfectly acceptable by (admittedly aggressive) Singapore standards.

If you ask me, all of this stuff is misplaced. The alarms and warnings should really be sounded outside of the Jeep and blared at other road users to let the know that you’re coming, and that they’d damn well better get out of your way. This is because the Grand Cherokee is roughly the size of a bungalow, and they’ll appreciate the warning.

Strangely enough it’s considered ‘mid-sized’ by US standards, but outside of the world’s fattest nation the Cherokee is positively humungous. It isn’t all that huge from nose to tail — a 5 Series is a smidgen longer — but the Cherokee is all of 1,943mm wide and 1,792mm tall, so it has an enormous amount of presence on the road. It basically embodies the badassery immortalised by Tennessee Ford in 1955’s Sixteen Tons: “If you see me comin’ better step aside. A lot of men didn’t. A lot of men died.”

It’s also one of those rare cars that you clamber up into instead of easing yourself down to board, and when you’re installed in the driver’s seat you can use the towering view to basically see into the next constituency. That’s a huge boon for the battle that daily traffic has become, allowing you to spot the enemy’s moves and upcoming hazards well in advance, so to speak.

Mind you, the Cherokee’s height is a variable thing. That’s because it rides on air suspension (Quadra-Lift by name), so at the poke of a button you’ll be able to lower the Cherokee to ease loading, or raise it to enable the car to tiptoe over boulders and such. It also has an aero mode that drops it by 15mm to cut drag and improve stability at high speed.

Whether you use it for nothing more than to impress friends with the Jeep’s ability to crouch or stretch on command, the air suspension’s fairly worth having, in that it gives the car a nicely pliant ride on the road. Some 4x4s are beefily sprung to cope with rugged terrain, but the result on tarmac is the sort of jiggly ride quality that keeps chiropractors in business. The Jeep, on the other hand, can shrug off bumps by letting compressed air take the brunt instead of your spine.

There are other features that give it off-the-street cred too, like hill descent control (which lets you crawl down steep terrain at a controlled speed without needing to touch the brakes) and a low-range transfer case, which is basically something only serious off-roaders have. It’s a gear reduction system that multiplies the engine’s torque to let a 4×4 trundle slowly over the kind of rough terrain that would give a mountain goat pause.

All of this is controlled via a simple knob that lets you choose five settings (Selec-Terrain, to use Jeep’s name for it). Choose ‘Sand/Mud’ or ‘Sport’, for instance, the Jeep adjusts things like its suspension height, traction control system, throttle response, gearbox shift points and so on to find the right combination of settings. Or you could leave it in ‘Auto’, like every customer will do.

While it wouldn’t be a proper Jeep without the ability to scale Mt Kinabalu, most off-roaders never have to climb anything more challenging than a carpark ramp. It’s just as well that the Cherokee has decent handling, up to a point. It actually shares platforms with the Mercedes ML, so feels much like that car in some ways. There’s some pitching and body roll as you pick up the pace around bends, but it’s otherwise quite stable and doesn’t feel as ungainly as its size would suggest. Our test car came with mud and snow tyres, which didn’t help things since they introduced plenty of slop to the steering and didn’t exactly grip with ferocity. But while the Cherokee doesn’t feel as if it would offer the taut precision of, say, a VW Touareg, a set of road tyres would help.

In a straight line there’s little to complain about, though. The Jeep’s 3.6-litre V6 packs 286bhp, and the alert eight-speed gearbox helps it to feel much more lively than the 0 to 100km/h time of 9.1 seconds suggests. Essentially, if you’re in the hurry, the Cherokee obliges, and the way it gallops along is enough to combine with the lofty driving position to impart god-like feelings on you as you close in on lesser beings on the road. You’ll pay for it later at the pumps, though. With a claimed consumption figure of 11.4L/100km when you tread lightly on the throttle, the reality is that the Jeep will remind you how the price of impatience is sometimes measure in petrodollars.

You might as well make the most of it by filling up the Jeep’s five seats as often as you can. There’s as much room in the cabin as a cathedral, after all, thanks in no small part to the Cherokee’s wheelbase of 2,915mm. Despite the panoramic glass roof, there’s headroom aplenty but the rear seats recline in case you happen to have NBA players on board. And if the boot isn’t big enough for you, they drop down in a 40/60 spilt fold, too — a one-handed operation.

The convenience doesn’t stop there. The tailgate opens and closes at a button’s touch, and the steering wheel has switches to control the entertainment system. The dashboard is fairly tidy because most of the car’s controls are operated through the touchscreen system, and essentially the state-of-the-art in car infotainment is present and accounted for; satnav and Bluetooth phone pairing are standard in the Jeep.

Indeed, American carmakers seem like the Koreans in the sense that they pack in plenty of features for the money. Does that generosity come at a sacrifice here? Possibly. While the Jeep has a lovely dashboard covered in stitched leather, it feels like they spent all their money on that and had to skimp on the cabin’s plastics.

Still, the Grand Cherokee’s pricing does come in at levels that undercut the German competition. $218,000 without a COE (for either this or a 3.0-litre turbodiesel version) makes the Jeep cheaper than a Touareg, and if what you want is plenty of size and stature you’ll be satisfied here. The cheapness of the cabin is easily forgotten when you’re on the move and the towering driving position gives you the immeasurable smugness that comes with the feeling that you’re able to squash other road users like so many insects. Probably with ‘Sixteen Tons’ on your lips.

NEED TO KNOW Jeep Grand Cherokee Summit

Engine 3,604cc, 24V, V6
Power 286bhp at 6350rpm
Torque 347Nm at 4300rpm
Gearbox 8-speed automatic
Top Speed 206km/h
0-100km/h 9.1 seconds
Fuel efficiency 8.8L/100km
CO2 256g/km
Price $218,000 without COE
Available now

Also Consider Mercedes-Benz ML 320, Volkswagen Touareg X 3.6

Photos by Leow Ju-Len (you should see the ones we didn’t run!)

The height of technology

Air suspension doesn’t just give you a cushy ride. It lets the Grand Cherokee alter its height to suit a number of occasions, a bit like you and me.

Normal — In the default setting the Jeep has 205mm of ground clearance, a respectable number of off-roading. A Land Rover Discovery has 185mm

Aero Mode — This drops the car by 15mm for high-speed stability and to decrease drag on the highway to save fuel

Park Mode — By lowering the car 40mm from the baseline setting, this eases entry/exit for short people and makes it easier to load the boot

Off-Road 1 — This adds 33mm to the standard height for off-roading.

Off-Road 2 — Got a dead elephant in the way? This gives you a mighty 270mm of ground clearance but you can only use it at low speed, for stability’s sake.