SUV showdown: Ford Kuga vs Jeep Cherokee

Crossovers and mid-size SUVs are big business – just ask Nissan – and at the larger end of the mid-size scale, coming to mix it with cars like the Freelander-replacing Discovery Sport, are cars like these: the Ford Kuga and Jeep Cherokee.

The Ford is a constant near the top of the sales charts, while the Cherokee has almost single-handedly brought Jeep back from the brink, but which is the better car?

Exterior

It’s always difficult to come to a meaningful conclusion when judging cars on their looks because beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder. Nevertheless, it’s the job we’re tasked with, so here goes.

To our eyes, the Kuga is the more attractive of the two, cutting a bulky but athletic figure with its taught lines and planted stance. That’s partly the fault of this top-spec model’s body kit, but even without that it’s a reasonably handsome brute.

The Jeep, though, is to be commended, trying a slightly different approach as the brand reinvents itself. Whereas Jeeps of old came with dead simple two-box designs, the new Cherokee is much more sophisticated, and only mild hints at the car’s rugged pedigree remain. The narrow daytime running lights and the fold in the seven-bar grille make it much more civilised than ever before, although you’d never call it sporty.

Interior

Becoming one of Fiat’s subsidiaries has done Jeep interiors the world of good – of that there can be no doubt – but there’s no denying that it still isn’t quite up to scratch. Things like the dashboard fascia and steering wheel buttons feel a bit cheaper than they should, especially when you consider that the Jeep has to take on the luxurious Land Rover Discovery Sport, and some of the switchgear feels tacky and loose. At least it seems to have been bolted together properly.

See all our Jeep Cherokee leasing deals here: business / personal

Stepping into the Ford is an improvement, albeit less of one than you might expect. Again, the Kuga’s cabin won’t give Land Rover any sleepless nights – it probably won’t give VW any worries either, come to that – but it’s more like it.

The expanse of black plastic atop the centre console is a pretty poor effort and the buttons housed there are distinctly low-rent, but if you take the time to twiddle the comparatively secure-feeling knobs and push the much more solid buttons found lower down the dash, you’ll see that Ford can get it right when it tries.

Sadly, we can’t end there. It would be remiss of us if we didn’t find some column inches for that infotainment system buried atop the dash. It’s naff. A 4.2in screen controlled by a confusing mess of cheap buttons is almost acceptable in a Fiesta, but when you’re trying to compete with the BMW iDrive system, it needs to be better. It’s a real shame when you consider the excellent touchscreen fitted to the Mondeo and Focus.

The Jeep’s touchscreen isn’t perfect, mind you. It’s big and generally quite logical, but it’s irritatingly slow at times.

It’s tit for tat in terms of practicality too. The Kuga’s 456-litre boot is perfectly good, but it’s no match the Jeep’s 591-litre load space. The Ford comes good when you fold the back seats though, upping the space to 1,653 litres compared to the Jeep’s 1,267 litres. There’s also a tad more space in the back of the Kuga when the seats are up, although both cars will happily carry four adults.

On the road

The problem with most SUVs in this class is the lack of driving pleasure caused by jacking the car up and making it capable off-road.

Despite using the chassis from an Alfa Romeo, the Jeep is a classic case in point. Fitting long springs and tall tyres has made the Cherokee a wallowy steer.

In the Ford, however, there isn’t much of a handling deficit. Of course, it’s nowhere near as balanced as a Focus, but it’s much more composed than the Cherokee and there’s less body roll, as well as a much sharper steering rack.

Around town, neither car has an especially cosseting low-speed ride, but as you speed up both become much less lumpy. At motorway cruising speed, the Kuga is the more refined of the two though, allowing you to settle into the big seats with minimal intrusion from road noise where the Jeep surrounds you in a cacophony of tyre roar.

It isn’t just road noise seeping into the cabin either. The Cherokee’s 2.0-litre diesel engine is much more agricultural than the Ford’s, despite having 140 horsepower compared to the Kuga’s 180. It’s torquey enough and off-road gearing means it pulls happily at lower speeds, but it’s noisy in the cruise and higher up the rev range. The six-speed manual transmission itself is pretty rough around the edges too, with a heavy, notchy shift action feeling butch but outdated, particularly when it’s compared to the Kuga’s slick, effortless ‘box.

For the stat-mad, the Kuga sprints to 62mph in 9.2 seconds and hits 126mph at full whack while the Cherokee is stuck with an even more leisurely 12-second 0-62 dash and 117mph top speed.

Off road

The Jeep has the heritage away from the tarmac, but it isn’t all you might expect. The Alfa Romeo underpinnings mean it’s compromised, and basic two-wheel-drive versions have even less ground clearance than the slightly smaller Nissan Qashqai.

Our car, however, was a four-wheel-drive Limited model with no such problems. Admittedly, we didn’t get chance to do any serious off-roading, but the torquey diesel engine and chunky tyres make it more than capable of dealing with the sort of grassy verges and muddy car parks that would have been avoided in a normal hatchback.

You might imagine that the Kuga would be left well behind by the Jeep, but as we found out last year, the Ford really can cut it on the rough stuff.

Check out our Ford Kuga leasing deals here: business / personal

Equally surprising is that the Ford’s a better tow car. A maximum braked trailer weight of 2.1 tonnes means the Kuga will pull a caravan half a tonne heavier than the Jeep.

In general though, the Jeep wins out as a 4x4, mainly because of its Terrain-selec system and its more off-road focused all-wheel drive (the Kuga has a torque vectoring system to send the power to the rear wheels only when needed, while the Cherokee’s semi-permanent set-up is disconnected at higher speed to improve economy).

Costs

Both our test cars came with high specifications, our Kuga being a top-of-the-range Titanium X Sport 180 and our Cherokee a second-from-top-spec Limited 4x4 140.

Neither car went without leather seats, satellite navigation, alloy wheels, cruise control or bi-xenon headlights, but then they’re pricey machines.

Base prices for the two cars were £32,045 for the Kuga and £33,810 for the Jeep, equating to business leasing deals of about £215 and £255 repectively. Our cars, however, had a few options fitted to bump those prices up.

The Jeep came with special paint (£625), a full-size spare (£225) and a panoramic sunroof (£1,095) to take the final price tag to £35,755.

In the Kuga, the sunroof was standard kit, but a £34,015 ticket price was caused in part by the fitment of safety kit like blind-spot monitoring and traffic sign recognition. It’s all handy stuff, but we’d probably save ourselves £1,000 and concentrate more. After all, you can buy an awful lot of pick-me-up coffees for that money, even at motorway services’ prices.

One optional extra we would retain, however, is the Kuga’s kick-activated power tailgate. This hands-free boot-opening gadget senses you ‘kicking’ the air under the rear bumper and opens the boot for you. It sounds like a gimmick, but it is really useful if you’re loading up with bulky or heavy items.

Once you’ve got hold of your car though, the running costs are likely to be fairly similar. Both cars manage between 50 and 55mpg according to the EU’s notoriously unrepresentative test, and both cars managed closer to 40mpg on test with us.

There’s more difference between the CO2 emissions though, with the Kuga managing 135g/km and the Cherokee 147g/km. In terms of VED, or road tax, as it’s commonly known, the difference is just £15 a year – chicken feed, in other words – but it’s a bigger issue when it comes to company car tax.

Business drivers will be in the 27% tax band with the Jeep, but the Kuga sneaks into the 25% band. Admittedly, the difference for a 20% taxpayer will probably be about £200 a year, which isn’t a huge difference, but 40% tax payers might baulk at paying an extra £400 a year on the Jeep.

Verdict

The Kuga is the winner of this test, but it isn’t a total walkover. The Ford’s the more competent road car, the best built and the one you’d want to live with every day, but the Cherokee feels more in tune with the off-road image. That gives it a certain charm missing from anything else in this segment.