The Jeep Cherokee that arrived for 2014 was a new kind of Jeep — car-based, front-wheel-drive in its cheapest form, aimed at the RAV4 and the CR-V — and it launched with a piece of hardware nobody else had put in a mass-market car: a nine-speed automatic transmission, made by ZF and built by Chrysler under licence. Nine gears promised better economy and smoother cruising. What early owners got was a gearbox that hunted between ratios, shifted with a thump, hesitated when asked to accelerate, occasionally refused to engage a gear at all, and would not reach ninth at any legal speed.
The numbers
The 2014 Cherokee has 2,641 owner complaints on file, the highest of any model year on this site outside the Ford Focus and the Hyundai Sonata. The 2015 car has 1,784, the 2016 car 1,403. Most are the transmission. The rest are the electrical system — a power-transfer unit on all-wheel-drive cars that could fail and lose drive, a recall for the wiring harness, and the Uconnect infotainment system that in 2015 was the subject of the first remote-hacking recall in the industry — plus the 2.4-litre Tigershark engine's oil consumption, which grew into a recall of its own later.
Chrysler issued more than a dozen software updates for the transmission between 2014 and 2017, replaced control modules and, on some cars, the transmission itself. The record shows the effect: the 2017 car scores 63, the 2018 car 75.
Jeep Cherokee: the record, year by year
| Year | Score | Verdict | NHTSA complaints | Recalls |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 92 | BUY | 3 | 1 |
| 2022 | 88 | BUY | 48 | 3 |
| 2021 | 82 | BUY | 154 | 4 |
| 2020 | 72 | BUY | 288 | 3 |
| 2019 | 25 | AVOID | 1,625 | 11 |
| 2018 | 39 | AVOID | 683 | 7 |
| 2017 | — | DATA PENDING | 0 | 0 |
| 2016 | — | DATA PENDING | 0 | 0 |
| 2015 | — | DATA PENDING | 0 | 0 |
| 2014 | — | DATA PENDING | 0 | 0 |
Live from the federal record as of 2026-10-04; linked years have their own page. Full table and repair costs on the Jeep Cherokee model page.
The 2019 relapse
For 2019 Jeep facelifted the Cherokee and added a 2.0-litre turbocharged engine. The complaint count rose again to 1,611 and the score fell to 33. The turbo engine attracts a share, the transmission calibration for the new engine another, and the facelift's new electrical architecture the rest. It is a smaller version of the 2014 launch — a new powertrain, a new round of problems.
The 2020 to 2023 cars are the ones to buy. By then the transmission software was mature, the engine options had settled, and the complaint counts fell below 300 and then below 200. The 2022 Cherokee scores 88 on a small record; the 2020 and 2021 cars score 85 on a deeper one. Jeep discontinued the Cherokee after 2023, which means the best years are also the last years and will not be replaced.
The same transmission elsewhere
The nine-speed went into the Chrysler 200 for 2015 (nearly 2,000 complaints that year), the Jeep Renegade for 2015, the Compass for 2018 (933 complaints) and the Chrysler Pacifica for 2017 (nearly 1,500). Every one of those launch years is a bad year on this site, and every one improves within two years. Honda licensed the same ZF design for the 2016 Pilot and the 2018 Odyssey, and their launch years show the same pattern. If you are looking at any car with this transmission, the rule is the same: not the first year, ideally not the second.
What to check
Drive it from cold and from hot. The cold-shift thump on an early nine-speed is the tell; so is a pause of more than a second between pressing the accelerator from a rolling stop and the car responding. Ask for the transmission software history — the update campaigns have numbers, and a dealer can list which have been applied. On an all-wheel-drive car, ask whether the power-transfer unit has been replaced; it was a common warranty repair on 2014 to 2016 cars.
Summary
Buy: 2020 to 2023. Acceptable: 2017 to 2018. Avoid: 2014, 2015 and 2019.