Originally Posted by ****egun2213
The liberty has more head room and a "better" engine but should still be worth looking at.
I'd still take a Cherokee over a Liberty any day. The Liberty my in-laws had was fairly top-of-the-line and I thought it handled terribly. I'm not a big fan of independent suspension on offroad vehicles (it can be done but to do it right is fairly expensive and involved... taking a car-like IS and grafting it onto offroad vehicles doesn't work) but combining IFS with live axle makes for some not so obvious handling characteristics... especially offroad. I also do not think the engine in the Liberty is better. They took the 4.7L V8 from the Grand Cherokee and lopped off two cyclinders to make it a V6. It still has a 90-degree angle on it which works fine for a V8 but in a V6 format is not balanced well. They should have gone to something like a 60-degree crank angle. I liked the old I6 in the Cherokee... plenty of low end torque, balanced and pretty reliable. Interesting thing about the Liberty is that I understand overseas, it's called the Cherokee. I guess they didn't think the foreign market would take to the Liberty name as would the US market.