2024 Jeep Gladiator Mojave First Drive Review: An Adventure at Any Speed

You can spot a 2024 Jeep Gladiator over the outgoing model by its black grille. There are two updates of actual significance: The truck now has curtain airbags (pretty cool for a convertible) and a significantly sleeker dashboard screen. Most importantly it’s still an absolute hoot to drive in the right situations.

I love me an old-school off-roader and Jeep’s Wrangler and Gladiator are as anachronistic as it gets these days. Solid axles, available manual transmission, quick-release doors, and Second World War styling make these things look like classic cars even as they sit on the showroom floor.

Sitting, however, has been the Gladiator’s biggest problem. After a storm of initial excitement when the Jeep truck was revealed in 2018, sales dropped off. By the end of 2023, dealers were so desperate to unload them that we saw discounts as high as $20,000 on some trims.

Reading the comments on that above-linked story was enlightening too—just a stampede of people saying Jeep dealers remained frustrating to work with and that a lot of those “discounts” that appeared online vanished in-store. Jeep itself ultimately conceded that these trucks were in fact too expensive and has cut MSRPs, which you can see reflected on build-and-price tools right now. For the record, that’s not at all common in the car biz.

The company is now using this 2024 model year refresh to recalibrate the Gladiator’s pricing again. In a briefing at this year’s Easter Jeep Safari in Moab, Utah, company reps described how consumer value’s improved by more standard features being packed into 2024-and-newer Gladiator base pricing.

Put another way, the vehicles are not getting cheaper per se, but buyers will get more for their money. Jeep is also planning to make a more concerted effort to advertise the Gladiator alongside the Wrangler. “Everywhere you see a Wrangler, you’ll see a Gladiator too,” Bill Peffer, Jeep’s new boss, told us. I found that interesting because, as you may recall, “it’s not just a Wrangler with a bed, it’s its own thing” was part of the Jeep Gladiator marketing battlecry when it first came out.

The vehicle’s lackluster sales performance is a little vexing when you think about