Here at MoparInsiders.com, we try to always have a vehicle in our fleet to use as a long-term test vehicle and update our readers on over the course of ownership. Avid readers of the site might remember that last September I traded in my 3-month-old Dodge Challenger R/T Scat Pack 1320 in on a new 2018 Jeep® Grand Cherokee Trackhawk.
Over the past year, I had put 21,000km on that Trackhawk, drove it from Vancouver, B.C to Toronto, Ontario and back, taken it to the drag strip, and even modified it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get it to the drag strip after doing all of the modifications I was really excited about, but I did manage to run an 11.5x in the quarter with it completely stock last year.
So if I liked the vehicle so much, why switch it up? Well, it was a leftover 2018 that I got a killer deal on as it sat on the lot for a year and a half which set me up really well for when it came time to trade it in. With the current world situation as you may or may not know, trade-in values are through the roof so I got a number on trade-in and realized that I could get out of it only losing $3k Canadian after almost a year of ownership and putting 20k km on it.
It was at that time that I decided to factory order a new 2020 Trackhawk to my specs. In the last weekend of June, I ordered this 2020 Trackhawk in slate blue, with the new 2020 ski grey and black full leather interior, panoramic sunroof, SRT high-performance audio, and black hood delete. Six weeks later on August 8th, my new Trackhawk arrived at the dealership.
I have now been driving the new Trackhawk for a few months and absolutely think I made the right choice. The full leather interior goes a long way to making the Trackhawk feel like it is worth the price of admission, and I was never really sold on the Velvet Red color, I didn’t mind it but I didn’t love it. So far I have added the JLT Cold Air Intake and JLT catch can over from the old Trackhawk along with the Magnaflow exhaust. For visual enhancements, I would like to add the MHF carbon fiber steering wheel and rear led blackout package along with some Eibach special edition lowering springs and some 22-inch wheels.
More performance modifications are of course planned as well as I have a 2.85 pulley, injectors, 180-degree thermostat, and more that need to be installed. I just need to get the computer sent out to our friends at HPTuners to get unlocked and then our friends at Dusterhoff Tuning will be doing a flex-fuel tune to extract as much performance out of our Trackhawk as possible while retaining excellent drivability.
Those modifications are likely to happen in the Spring as right now our local tracks are closed for the season and I would like to get some more miles on the Jeep before voiding to warranty to make sure there are no lingering issues. Unfortunately, our new Trackhawk has already spent two weeks in the service bay to get an oil leak under load diagnosed and fixed which turned out to be a bad oil cooler line from the factory.
Stay tuned to MoparInsiders.com and our YouTube channel for more to come on our new 2020 Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk and our 1-year ownership review of the 2018 Trackhawk in the upcoming days.
I also want to take a second to note that we purchase all of our long-term test vehicles with our own money and aim to provide an unbiased opinion on our time with the vehicles.
Our Long-Term 2020 Jeep®Grand Cherokee Trackhawk Image Gallery:
