Stick-shifted 1986 Jeep Cherokee shows where crossovers come from

We have the original Jeep Cherokee to thank (or blame) for the crossover's rise. Released for 1984, and called XJ internally, the model gained a loyal following by bridging the gap between family-friendly station wagons and burly body-on-frame SUVs. Many early XJs were driven into the ground, heavily modified, or chewed alive by rust, but a clean-looking example with cool options has popped up on Cars & Bids.

Jeep may have drawn inspiration from existing four-wheel-drive cars when it started developing the XJ. Subaru had offered wagons with four-wheel-drive for years, and American Motors Corporation (AMC), which Jeep was part of, had managed to carve out a niche for the four-wheel-drive Eagle wagon. Regardless, the idea was to downsize the Wagoneer-derived Cherokee into a more daily-drivable vehicle without losing off-road capability. The brand notably shifted away from body-on-frame construction and created a new architecture called Uniframe.

By downsized, we mean downsized. The original, Wagoneer-based Cherokee measured 183.5 inches long, 75.6 inches wide, and 65.9 inches tall, and it weighed 3,764 pounds. The XJ Cherokee posted numbers of about 165, 70, and 63, respectively, and it tipped the scale at approximately 2,900 pounds. It was available with two or four doors (most of its rivals were two-door-only), which made it well-suited to family-hauling duties. Jeep's paid bet off: The XJ-generation Cherokee nearly doubled the brand's sales about a year after it went on sale.

The example listed on Cars & Bids is the Pioneer model, which was positioned a notch above the base trim in 1986. It's finished in Olympic White with a blue cloth interior, it's riding on body-colored 15-inch steel wheels, and it was ordered with swing-away spare tire carrier that Jeep offered as an option on early models. It's nearly unmodified and it appears to be in fairly good shape for an off-roader that's quickly approaching its 40th birthday. Effortlessly rugged, it perfectly illustrates what the term «SUV» meant to many drivers in the middle of the 1980s, and it will certainly strike your nostalgia chord if you spent any amount of time in the nation's mountainous regions in the 1990s.