I'm Ryan from extremeterrain.com and in this video we're gonna be bringing you the 2 liter
and the 3.6 liter JL out on the trail.
What we have here today are my two-door 2 liter turbo JL that I have never had off road
yet, so I'm very excited to be testing that thing out.
And over here we have a 3.6 liter four-door Sahara and what we're going to be doing is
hitting a couple of different obstacles out here designed to show you how these Jeeps
work in different RPM ranges.
We know that these are gonna produce different amounts of horsepower and different amounts
of torque because we put both the 2 liter and the 3.6 liter on the rollers and saw what
those numbers look like.
Make sure you subscribe to the YouTube channel that way you can check out that video.
But if you haven't seen it yet, the 3.6 liter made 239 horsepower and 223 foot-pounds of
torque where the 2 liter turbo made 233 horsepower and 270 foot-pounds of torque.
So the big difference there is that torque number, 270 foot-pounds out of the 2 liter
turbo engine.
However, because it is a turbo, we saw that coming in right around that 3000 RPM range
and up where the power band on the 3.6 liter was a little bit flatter.
So I'm very interested to see how that actually plays out on the trail.
These Jeeps are both bone stock.
We did air down the tires to about 25 PSI and disconnect the factory sway bars, but
other than that completely stocked because we wanted to give you a really clear comparison
of what these vehicles are unmodified.
This Jeep is going to be heavily modified very soon after I start my build.
So again, make sure you subscribe to the YouTube channel that way you can follow along with
the build.
This Jeep is not going to be this small for very long.
All that being said, let's hit the trails.
So we got our first little shake downhill, we're in the 3.6 liter here.
It's nothing all that crazy, but there's a little bit of a ledge on the right-hand side
down toward the bottom.
A little bit of a ledge on the left up toward the top.
So normally I'm more of a technical wheeler but I'm gonna give it a little bit of throttle.
I do you want to feel the engine differences, so I do want to be choosing the engine.
So I'm gonna give it a little bit of throttle, see if I can get a little bit of a shakedown
to see how things feel for low.
Put it down into first gear.
So let's see how it feels.
First little ledge coming up here.
No problem here.
Even giving a little throttle, didn't have a lot of slip.
So even giving it a little bit of extra throttle it didn't get a lot of spinning there, but
it was a pretty good shakedown.
Let's hop in the 2 liter, see how it handles it, and then we'll get down to some hills
that are designed to specifically show us some higher RPM and some lower RPM stuff.
So here we are now in the 2 liter, going up the same little shakedown obstacle.
I haven't had this Jeep off-road, certainly haven't wheeled with this engine, so very
exciting to see how it feels.
Again, give it a little bit of throttle just like before, get a little bit of wheel spin
and see how she takes it.
So coming up that, I did give it a little bit more throttle.
Trying to get a little bit of wheel speed, trying to get the RPMs up a little bit.
It really felt like in four-low in these Jeeps that everything is sort of dumb down.
It's a little bit softer.
So we had a little bit of high, little bit of low.
That was a pretty good little shakedown.
Now let's move on to the next obstacle where we're gonna stick with something that's a
little bit more of that low RPM crawling.
Now it's time to hit a much more difficult trail.
This is actually a black trail.
For those of you that aren't familiar, they rake trails here at Rausch Creek and a lot
of off-road parks just like skiing trails, so you have green, blue, black, red.
So this is pretty aggressive, but I think it is going to really show a big difference
in engines and in power feeling when you are doing some of that lower speed crawling.
So I have Sage out in front of me here giving me a spot because I'm definitely gonna need
it going through this.
And we're just gonna see how far up this trail we can make it.
And here we go, let's get after it.
So as with the first hill, it feels like the 3.6 liter does have plenty of power for what
we're doing here.
These are some pretty big rocks.
Pretty much everything I'm coming up to is a pretty aggressive step.
I'm just taking our time crawling through here, but yeah, it feels good.
You give it a little bit of throttle and it seems to get right up and go.
This is our first really big step here that we're going to attempt.
I have to take it out a bit of an angle because I don't think we have the approach angle here
being a stock high Jeep, but we're going to see.
So we've gotten as far as I think we're going to make it up this black trail, which is pretty
much as far as I thought we would get.
We just don't quite have the lift or the tire size to make it up this, but what it did do
was really show us how much power we have to come up to an obstacle where it's pretty
much as big as the front tire is and in four-low, give it a little bit of throttle and be able
to just pull right up over those obstacles.
Now we're going to back down this trail, we're gonna hop into the two-door 2 liter and see
how it handles it.
So here we go.
We got back to the bottom of our little test trail here, this time in the 2 liter two-door.
Gonna run it again and see how much of a difference or maybe how little the difference the engine
makes.
Here we go.
So far, so good.
Again, as we come up to these ledges that are some of them as big as the tires, you
get the tire set right up to it, give it a little bit of throttle, you have plenty of
power to pull up and out of these little gullies between the boulders.
And we're pretty much at an idle just above when we need to get over something.
We're not really bumping over anything.
This is really that slow technical crawling.
I'm pretty confident we're still not gonna make it all the way up here, but we're gonna
get as far as we can.
So we did get a little bit further than we got in the four-door with the 3.6 liter.
Again, not really because of one engine over the other, really just one body style over
the other.
But again, running this was to show you what slow speed crawling looks like with the 3.6
liter and with the 2 liter engine.
Both of them performed very, very well on this hill.
What we're gonna do now is go up to a hill where it requires a little bit more wheel
speed and see how one engine performs versus the other in that type of scenario.
All right, so this is going to be the third obstacle here.
Pretty snowy hill.
Expecting a good set of wheel slipped here.
So I'm gonna get the RPM up, see how the 3.6 liter feels up in that slightly a higher RPM
range.
So here we go.
Well, I would say that's a pretty good test of a little bit more wheel speed.
It's really interesting what these newer Jeeps do to modulate the RPM for you while you're
trying to get out of an obstacle there.
So I was on the throttle working the wheel back and forth a little bit.
I knew there was a big ledge there to my right that I didn't want into the door, so I was
being a little bit careful, but even as I was in the RPM, the Jeep was dropping RPM
for me and changing things up which is really interesting.
The 3.6 liter still had plenty of torque once I did find some traction there to pull me
up and out of that little-stuck spot.
So now we'll head back down the hill and hop in the 2 liter to try that out.
So we're gonna head up the same obstacle now in the 2 liter and see how that feels again.
Gonna probably end up in the same situation, a little bit of wheel speed, kind of searching
for the grip and see how it goes.
Here we go.
There we go.
Looks like we are up and over.
So again, I noticed a lot of the same things as I did with the 3.6 liter.
The engine RPM is really more controlled by the ECU than anything else even though I was
on the throttle working the wheel back and forth trying to find that grip.
The RPM was being modulated sort of for me by the ECU, but eventually once I did find
that grip, more than enough torque, more than enough power to pull us up and out of that
hole up over those ledges.
It was really more of a traction issue than a power issue.
Both engines felt like they had more than enough power to get us through this obstacle,
even at the higher RPM that we're working in and the higher wheel speeds.
So I know a lot of you came here expecting me to tell you which one of these Jeeps you
should buy if you plan on doing a lot of off-roading, either the new 2 liter turbo or the redesigned
3.6 liter from the JK, and the answer is they're both really, really good.
I think we showed you from the tests today, either in a low RPM, a high RPM, a little
bit of a mix, that both of these Jeeps are going to perform very, very well for you.
Now, if you were in a situation where you're on the road, you're accelerating from a stop,
you're merging onto a highway, the additional power that you get, more specifically the
additional torque that you get from the 2 liter turbo is going to be really, really
useful for you and you're also going to get some other benefits like fuel mileage with
that 2.0.
But the test today was off-road and I have to say these are very, very evenly matched.
If you were making a decision just based off of the test like we did today, you will be
really hard to find a clear winner.
Now, all of that being said, both of these Jeeps are still bone stock.
Once you get big tires, gears, a bunch of armor involved, that may change where the
power band sits and you may get a little bit more of a clear winner one way or the other
once you do that.
Speaking of all of that, this is probably the last time you're gonna see this little
two-door bone stock like this.
We are going to be adding all of those things I just mentioned and a lot more, so make sure
you comment below and let me know what you think I should be doing with my 2 liter two-door
in the build that is coming very, very soon.
And of course, as always, make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel that way you can check
out more JL videos and some more of the best Jeep content out there.