Jeeps recalled for leaks? Aren't they our bread crumbs?

[[ O o \\|// o O ]]

I thought the leaks were to find our way back after a day of Trail Testing.

[goldhammer]

The XJ's tanks are like the old Pintos and Mustangs....Right behind the bumper, but no recalls on those

Actually the fires resulting from that clears the brush out to see the sights and where we are...

[FSJunkie]

Yea, I heard this on the news last night. What a bunch of hooey.

I've worked on my ZJ Grand Cherokee's gas tank several times. There is nothing wrong with the design. In fact, the factory skid plate is very strong. The tank itself is thick Poly and is quite durable, certainly more so than the thin steel one on my Wagoneer, which the driver sits right on top of.

"Eight deaths related to Grand Cherokees catching fire have been reported..." Eight deaths is 20 years sounds really good to me!

Related to gas tanks catching fire: My dad owned a really nice brand new Pinto in 1973. Deluxe everything. With only 10,000 miles on the clock, he met head-on with a pickup truck that had a camper in the bed and a trailer in tow at a combined speed of 60 MPH. No boom-boom. Completely totaled the Pinto and amazed the cops on the scene that he walked away from it with little injury. I'd rather be in that Pinto than my Wagoneer for that crash.

[pcoplin]

Fuel tanks don't explode anyway. Sort of "whoomps". I'm more scared of bumper shocks and hatch struts.


Gas catches fire, gas is carried in tanks, vehicles sort of need them. Shame...

[carnuck]

I got this in my email the other day:




Last fall I was out for a drive with my dad when we hit a sudden traffic jam. A tractor trailer couldn't stop in time, so it hit a bunch of cars from behind. We spun into a guardrail, but we were okay. We got out of the car to see that another family had survived, but their car, a Jeep Grand Cherokee, was on fire.

My dad tried to help them out of the car, but he was only able to save one of the teenage boys. The other boy and the mom were trapped, and burned to death. It was the most awful thing I have ever seen.

Jeep knows the fuel tank on Grand Cherokees is in the "crush zone," which means the car is likely to catch on fire in an accident. Only 27 people ever died in Ford Pinto fires, but the Jeep Grand Cherokee number is 287 and rising. So why are these cars still on the road?

I started a petition on Change.org calling on the Department of Transportation and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to issue a recall on all 1993-2004 Jeep Grand Cherokees and get these dangerous cars off the road. Will you click here to sign?

After the accident, I spent months grieving. I couldn't get that family out of my head. Not only watching this mother and teenager burn to death, but watching her 18-year-old son watching it happen. Watching him cry, "Mom, Mom." I'm a single mom with two teenaged boys, too, so that really hit home. When that boy was crying for his mother, he sounded like my boys.

The scariest part is this doesn't just affect people who drive Jeeps -- if you rear-end a Jeep Grand Cherokee in a collision, your car could catch on fire, too.

I've seen lots of Change.org petitions have success before, and I really hope mine will be one of them. The Department of Transportation and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are supposed to keep Americans safe. I hope that if enough people sign my petition, they'll do the right thing and protect our safety over Chrysler's bottom line.

Click here to sign my petition calling on the Department of Transportation and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to recall 1993-2004 Jeep Grand Cherokees, which have killed 287 people so far.

https://www.change.org/petitions/dot-an ... zNimMBcAKU

Thank you,

Jenelle Embrey
Linden, Virginia
Sign Jenelle's Petition


She claimed she lost her daughter in one of these fires.

[pcoplin]

Loss of life is always unfortunate. I see it too often at work.

However, 287 people out of 3,000,000 produced Grand Cherokees from 93-04. That's 0.0096%. Is it really a problem? I don't think so. Some of these Change petitions are silly. I see lots of cars catch fire after a wreck. Some a good burners.

I wish car makers could make fuel tanks out of unobtanium, however I don't think that's cost effective.

Edit: just saw NHTSA claims it was 44 deaths. That's not very many at all. The Pinto number was 20 for the same 3mil produced, and that could just be the difference in data collection.

[Brizio]

I think is like the elk test on the Grand Cherokee some years ago.

[FSJunkie]

People want to be safe. But they also don't want government regulations infringing on their freedom. They don't want their cars to catch fire, but they don't want the government telling them what cars to drive and how to build them. Think about the TSA and security in airports. Sure, plane flights are safer from terrorists now, but people did give up quite a bit of privacy and convenience for it.

Can't have your cake and eat it too.

With an increase is safety also comes a decrease in freedom and privacy, in most cases.

A agree, .0096% is pretty darn good in my book. It sounds heartless to write off lost lives like that, but as a pure statistic...

We live in an era where it's easier to sue and collect monitary damages (a reward, basically) for your stupidity than to take responsibility for your actions. Push the blame onto someone else because you spilled hot coffee into your lap and burned yourself. I'm not saying owners are at fault for their Jeeps catching fire, I'm merely using it as an example for the world we live in.

[Stuka]

I got this in my email the other day:




Last fall I was out for a drive with my dad when we hit a sudden traffic jam. A tractor trailer couldn't stop in time, so it hit a bunch of cars from behind. We spun into a guardrail, but we were okay. We got out of the car to see that another family had survived, but their car, a Jeep Grand Cherokee, was on fire.

My dad tried to help them out of the car, but he was only able to save one of the teenage boys. The other boy and the mom were trapped, and burned to death. It was the most awful thing I have ever seen.

Jeep knows the fuel tank on Grand Cherokees is in the "crush zone," which means the car is likely to catch on fire in an accident. Only 27 people ever died in Ford Pinto fires, but the Jeep Grand Cherokee number is 287 and rising. So why are these cars still on the road?

I started a petition on Change.org calling on the Department of Transportation and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to issue a recall on all 1993-2004 Jeep Grand Cherokees and get these dangerous cars off the road. Will you click here to sign?

After the accident, I spent months grieving. I couldn't get that family out of my head. Not only watching this mother and teenager burn to death, but watching her 18-year-old son watching it happen. Watching him cry, "Mom, Mom." I'm a single mom with two teenaged boys, too, so that really hit home. When that boy was crying for his mother, he sounded like my boys.

The scariest part is this doesn't just affect people who drive Jeeps -- if you rear-end a Jeep Grand Cherokee in a collision, your car could catch on fire, too.

I've seen lots of Change.org petitions have success before, and I really hope mine will be one of them. The Department of Transportation and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are supposed to keep Americans safe. I hope that if enough people sign my petition, they'll do the right thing and protect our safety over Chrysler's bottom line.

Click here to sign my petition calling on the Department of Transportation and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to recall 1993-2004 Jeep Grand Cherokees, which have killed 287 people so far.

https://www.change.org/petitions/dot-an ... zNimMBcAKU

Thank you,

Jenelle Embrey
Linden, Virginia
Sign Jenelle's Petition


She claimed she lost her daughter in one of these fires.

This appears to be a twisted version of the actual story that was reported by CNN. They also stretched the number of deaths by quite a bit. Not to mention they have photos of brand new Grand Cherokees on their site that are not affected by this at all. People that post up these kind of sites need to be punched for the lies that they include. People that don't know any better take them as truth, when they are not.

This is one of the images from their site. Would moving the fuel tank or adding a skid plate help when the rar axle is now pushed up into the front seats?


This "Issue" affects dozens of car models, it is not just the Jeeps. And putting a thin skid plate (What the NHTSA wants Chrysler to do) is not going to do anything to fix the issue.

The cases where a fire has occurred has been in "High Energy Impacts". This is mostly limited to very high speed rear end accidents. Such as the one CNN posted where a Big Rig going 65mph smashed into a stopped Grand Cherokee. The back three feet of the Cherokee was completed smashed.

The Jeeps (And every other SUV of that era) has the tank in the same place, and they all met safety guidelines for the time. The story above is trying to make this into something much larger than it is. There is no "Fix" for this issue on the Jeeps, or any other SUV.

I should note that I own a Liberty that is included in this recall. I am not concerned about driving it, or having my wife drive it. And I agree with Chrysler refusing to fix something that passed all regulations of the time. The NHTSA cannot go and apply todays crash standards to yesterdays vehicles.

[FSJunkie]

This is one of the images from their site. Would moving the fuel tank or adding a skid plate help when the rar axle is now pushed up into the front seats?

No kidding. Even if the car didn't have a gas tank in the first place, I would not consider that survivable. It's gas tank, it's going to leak somehow on impact. I'd rather have it leak way at the rear end of the car than under my butt like it does on vehicles equipped with saddle tanks (like our FSJ's).

OK, so let's just assume for a moment that the Grand Cherokees are actually showing a tendancy to catch fire on rear impact, despite the fact that all Grand Cherokees have received excellent impact reviews by IIHS. The hot engine of the car doing the rear-ending is heading straight into the gas tank in the rear of the Grand Cherokee. If the tank was saddle mounted, the danger would be for a side impact.

No matter where you put the gas tank, if the hot engine of an impacting car coms in contact with it, it's going to rupture and catch fire from the heat. You might as well place the tank way in the back of the car, far away from the passengers.

In that regard, the Grand Cherokee (and other vehicles) with rear-mounted gas tanks are actually the safest designs.

[Brizio]

The Grand Cherokee in the picture is a 1993... And look a the rear of the car!!!


I wonder now if they should recall/modify all the old cars pre '65, where safety was not a problem... Did you remember this???

[carnuck]

Smashing a new car into a rust bucket bondo buggy and claiming the new car was safer was disingenuous!

[Stuka]

Smashing a new car into a rust bucket bondo buggy and claiming the new car was safer was disingenuous!

It actually wasn't a rust bucket. It started off as a very nice car. It annoyed a lot of car collectors because they chose such a clean car. But the test showed everybody in the Impala would have died, while everybody in the Malibu would have walked away. It was to show how far safety has come in 50 years.

[letank]

Imagine that instead of gas, it was a hydrogen tank being hit at 65mph!... this is what "launch" is all about...

Sad stories indeed.

[FSJunkie]

It actually wasn't a rust bucket. It started off as a very nice car. It annoyed a lot of car collectors because they chose such a clean car.

Yea.......but it's still a Chevy. There are enough of them to go around and enough of their parts infiltrating other makes of vehicles.