Rental Car Review: 2023 Jeep Compass Italian spec–The Big Mac of Venice

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– Posted on July 23, 2024

The streets of Venice are quiet at 6AM, which is a blessed relief from the daytime hell-swarm of tourists stuffing gelato cups and Coke cans into the crevices of St. Marks Square when the waste bins are full.  At this hour you can walk at peace for miles through the echoing staccato pattern of water dribbling off drainpipes and striking the cobblestones of this impossible, inspiring maze.  Gulls cackle overhead through the periodic maritime mist, and the scattered voices of locals roll out from the early morning espresso bars. Little about this place feels North American at this hour.  Until, that is, you round a bend near the Rialto Bridge and see it: A McDonald’s.  

An unpleasant sight, but not surprising.  This former seat of power has been kept economically viable by commercial tourism for some time now and nothing says globalized leisure food like the golden arches.  But this is no ordinary Mickey-Ds. There’s some European flair here. Parmesan and pears are optional on your Big Mac. Cold beer is available!  A little bit of corporate consumer America transplanted here, with a quasi-regional twist, for our familiarity and comfort.  

Well, not my familiarity and comfort. I kept about as far away from this place and its surrounding generic retail metastasis as I could during our stay, instead haunting the quieter neighborhoods of the island.  But when I showed up at the car rental counter days later to pick up our transportation to the Alps I was nonetheless served a Big Mac with parmigiano reggiano and pear sauce: a Jeep Compass with a turbodiesel and manual transmission. I had reserved a Volkswagen T-Roc and was looking forward to it, but the “or similar” clause had apparently just kicked in. 

I developed a crude little rhyme for this phenomenon, right there on the spot, and it goes a little something like this: 

 

“Bait and switch? 

You son of a b*tch. 

Let’s see what your lies hath wrought.”

 

Not quite a shoe-in for the Walcott Prize and I’m guessing the car rental staff wouldn’t catch the emotional subtlety and grammatical nuance, so I kept it to myself. 

Staring morosely at the ‘J-e-e-p’ on the key fob, I sigh, roll the suitcases out through the now-hostile Mediterranean sun to the assigned stall, and immediately become irritated with the Compass on multiple fronts. It would be several days before I could come to appreciate much about it.  

First, I need to just admit that the Big Mac analogy doesn’t really work here.  Mopar or no car? This is a no car, then.  The Compass is a frequent sight in the US, but this is a European product with an American badge.  The platform is Fiat, the engine is Fiat, the transmission is from a division of Fiat. I didn’t check the door jamb, but it was very likely assembled at the plant in Melfi, Italy.  The most American part of the vehicle is perhaps the mini-SUV road manners.  This is no 500 Abarth with a lift kit.

The promised Veedub I didn’t get to rent. Probably didn’t miss out on much.

 

Back to the parking garage.  The Compass’s cargo hold somehow fits no more than our diminutive Fiesta back home due to the dangling cargo cover that gets in the way of everything and cannot be stowed anywhere else inside the vehicle.  It robs you of the top third of storage volume. Sure, you can remove it, but where will it go?  Over the parking garage railing and three floors down into the bushes?  I was tempted.  To avoid this tantrum, I placed one of the backpacks on top of the cover, hoping it wouldn’t crush it or snap the string suspending it.   

Online review pictures like this one assured me I had rented a large enough vehicle. But this fellow didn’t have to contend with the insidious cover.

 

Everyone fits in the cabin and the A/C is pretty cold, so that’s a win, but then the driving nannies pester before I can even leave the garage.  The parking sensors are calibrated to screech about objects several miles away while the active lane assist tugs on the steering wheel like a toddler wanting your attention if you get anywhere near the painted lines.  On the tighter confines of European roads this car is therefore always panicking and clutching its pearls.  The buttons to silence the nannies must be pressed every time the car is started.

We’re now through the last of the airport roundabouts and are attempting to accelerate onto the Autostrada, at which point I’m reminded that it’s a bit of a thing for some US car enthusiasts to pine for the little turbodiesels we can’t have.  I should ask them why they want this.  The 1.6 liter Multijet II under the hood makes all of 131 horsepower to move a 3600 pound vehicle.  It has a plump little midrange and scoots just fine up to the 50 km/h limit of in-town roads, but if you actually need to move out on one of the numerous short merge ramps onto the 90-110 km/h highways, it’s a throwback to the Civics and Corollas of the early 90s whimpering their way to freeway speeds.  Rated acceleration is more than 11 seconds to 60 mph and it has a distinctly limited ability to overtake slower highway traffic.  On the 130 km/h stretches it is happier succumbing to the wind resistance and loafing in the right lane at 110 with the many other efficiency-oriented cars doing the same. Everything is sufficient but nothing is enviable.

Big ‘ol cue ball shift knob. It’s oversize, feels vaguely metallic, but hollow and lightweight.

 

The transmission doesn’t help matters.  The lever is a bit tall, the throws a bit long, the synchros slow to engage. The upshift to second will not be rushed.  When coming out of a full-lock uphill hairpin on one of those steep 5 inch wide Alp roads in first gear, the shift takes long enough for gravity to slow the car to where the turbo has nearly fallen out of boost.  You run it toward redline, hurry the 1-2 upshift as best you can, and still nearly bog it once you come back on throttle in second.  On the upside, it requires you to fully engage with the operation of the machine, and the action of the shifter, though slow, is decent. 

The interior is the strongest attribute. Clean design, good materials, seats 4 comfortably. They did well here.

 

The handling is a tad soggy for a small vehicle, probably because it’s fat for its size and prancing about high on its tippy toes. It drives a bit tall and heavy.  In a curious expression of assetto corsa, the rental company put Michelin Pilot Sport 4S summer performance tires on this tub, so while it may have been heeling over in turns the tires stayed glued like Mikaela Shiffrin’s skis set on edge down the slalom.  That analogy would probably work better if Mikaela were 250 pounds of wobbly beer gut like this Jeep, but you know what I mean.

The interior is pretty good. Acceptable seats for several hours at a time, decent touchpoints, very nice steering wheel, actual switchgear, reasonable noise levels.  Solid and rattle-free so far.  It’s not evident in the powertrain department, but I think this is a mid priced vehicle here and the interior at least upholds that end of the bargain.  

You’re not fooling me! You don’t share a single gene!

 

Overall verdict? To be taken with a grain of salt. I didn’t drive its home market competitors and was subconsciously using North American reference points because that’s all I know.  The automotive ecosystem is obviously different in Europe, where the first two powertrain tiers in a Mercedes E-Class would get smoked by a base model US Camry.  We often view that horsepower surfeit as an inarguable victory, but every time I see yet another jacked-up 4-ton 4×4 ego enhancer roaring down our roads ready to kill everything in its path, I can’t help but wonder if we occupy an unhealthy headspace and would benefit from a long stint behind the wheel of something more reasonable like this Euro-Jeep.    

It’s financed, the mods cost thousands, I’m commuting in it, but I’m going to complain about gas prices.

 

Time breeds familiarity, which breeds acceptance, by which point the Compass is a fully decent vehicle.  That is not a ringing endorsement, but it did everything we needed it to do, the little diesel was a mildly amusing novelty, and I enjoyed driving a stick shift even if it wasn’t a very good one. 43 mpg observed is an impressive figure.  AWD versions would have their uses in the Alps, but the FWD model we had feels pointless–I’d just get one of the sleek looking Golf, Skoda, or Opel wagons at that price and get better road manners and cargo volume in the process.