Renault should stick to euro-chic design and let ze germans do the mechanicals.

Finally an engine of the day that I've had on one of my vehicles. 4.0 FTW!

I miss my Cherokee sometimes.

Wonderful engine - had one in a '79 Jeep that I sold to a buddy - body's shot, but the Jeep still runs.

The only experience I have with these motors is in my off-road-only $500 cherokee. It makes me smile every time I turn the key. It just sounds so mechanical, like starting up an ocean liner.

The absence of the 4.0L keeps me from fully appreciating the newest generation of Wranglers.

They could've updated the engine with better fuel management or forced induction, but noOOooo, they had to drop in the stupid 3.8L minivan engine.

Fools.

I had the 258 in my CJ-7 that hit on all 6 cylinders if you just revved it a little, and the 4.0 in a Cherokee (remind me again why Jeep dropped that model?).

The 258 was the worse of the two in every way, so I unsurprisingly have much fonder memories of it than the 4.0 (also, the latter uses the measuring system of the devil).

My father in law has one of these (or a derivation thereof) sitting in his '96 Jeep. Good motor, pretty rock solid. The Jeep has had issues with the front axle, and the interior is slowly fossilizing, but that 4.0 keeps on ticking over day in and day out.

One of the best engines I ever had in a car, well jeep. Sold my Cherokee to a friend and it still runs today...when I sold it it had 313,000 miles on it. 4.0L FTW!

As my second car I have a 94 Jeep Cherokee with the 4.0 liter. What trooper it is. I'd buy another one in a second. Is it just me or it sounds like a diesel when idling?

Leave it to Chrysler/Jeep to be blessed with one of the most bulletproof engines of all time, and saddle it with crap interior, wiring, etc. It's not like 4x4 Toyotas were luxury cars, and if Jeeps weren't so relatively crappy (outside of the motor/off road underpinnings), then the 199/232/258/4.0 would have the same rep as motors like the 22R-E. Underrated for sure. I'm waiting for the right 232-powered postal jeep to turn into a LeMon.

The 232 was the first engine I rebuilt, in my '64 Rambler Classic 770. In retrospect, it was a lot of fun, and appallingly simple.

Okay, it would have been appallingly simple except for one little detail. The previous rebuilder had never degrimed the engine completely before repainting it. Now, if you were to flip that picture around, on the opposite side there are two flat, square panels that remove with a single nut each. These are there to make it easy to seat the pushrods when you're (re)building the engine, and boy, do they work perfectly.

If you know they're there. We, on the other hand had an engine block that had two decades of grime built up OVER the bolts, creating these two little breast-shaped mounds on the side of the block. That grime was then PAINTED OVER by the previous person who rebuilt it, making it look like it was part of the block.

As a result, I spent two days doing nothing but trying to seat the pushrods by feel from the top of the block. Insert, wiggle, tap tap, set... slide. Try again. Insert, wiggle...

Oh keep your minds out of the gutter. Honestly.

After two days, I had climbed up into the engine bay, one foot on either side of the block, and was peering down with a flashlight into the block. I happened to kick the block in the appropriate spot, and this large chunk of painted gunk came off onto my shoe... revealing the access panels behind.

I used language that day my parents had never heard before. And when I showed them the reason, they understood completely.

@Pope Dearthair the Awesometh: good times... good times...

@Bumblebee: Metric is the measurement system of the devil? The entire engineering world must all be a bunch of heathens, then, because we all use it. It's not our fault it's just plain better.

inline engines built in modern, thin-wall casting configurations are prone to piston rattle. That's the diesel-like quality that the Jeep I6 has had since they tried to modernize it. The end-of-days coil-on-plug configuration was an insult.

Yay, it made the EOTD!

My father bought an AMC with the 232, pre-cats. Kenosha quality control was so bad the motor had a pinhole through the block...the dealership put an additive in and it went another 180K.

Sometimes in my dreams I can still hear the clattering valves.

Anybody see the Mopacer? This guy modernized his daughter's Pacer with a later-model 4.0L. Fuel injection and all. [mopacer.com]

I think I'll go blow some donuts in my Jeep after work to celebrate the 4.0 goodness within.

It really is the perfect motor for a Wrangler though (excluding a diesel. None of this 3.8 madness. It sounds loud and mechanical with decent performance, as it should.

Metric is awesome, except for those times when it's used along with English (which, ironically, is fully embraced only by America). England, I'm looking at you: Pick a side, already!

"My car's wheelbase is cm, speed is mph, weight is kg, and economy is mpg."

My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.

@elwood: Here's the really stupid part; legally, the definition of a pound is 453.59237 grams, and has been defined thusly in the US since the 1890's.

There's nothing wrong with the Renault/Bendix injection, I've got 2 87's.
You've got to be handy with a multimeter, and I carry the fuel injection service manual with me at all times.
We don't need no stinking OBD codes to troubleshoot!
I'm pretty sure the ECM would survive the oncoming nuclear holocaust, damn thing is a brick and weighs about 4 lbs.
Renix FTW!

Among my many "quit my real job and become the crazed old coot with a bunch of junk cars" plans is the idea of doing for eagles and assorted AMC I-6 powered vehicles with Lovecraft has done for diesel Mercedes.

Soon all the hipsters will be driving 4.0L powered SX4s. (Avenger supercharger and 4.6L stroker kit optional).

@AshMaster78: In engineering classes where we had homework or test problems with English units, I would generally convert everything to metric at the start of the problem, and then convert the answer back to English at the end.

@TurboBrick: Yeah, the technical community in the U.S. has adopted metric anyways. It's everyone else that's behind.

@jack_pine: I really like that car. I especially like that it's not a big-buck buildup, but it still got featured in Hot Rod Magazine.

According to the ever-reliable Wikipedia the 4.0 is still in production in China, so this one lives on!

In 1972. Mill 120 thounads off the head and you could out run ever Mustang in town thru the 1/4 mile with a Gremlin..Been there done that.

I've got the 4.0L I6 (i.e. STR8SIX) in my 2001 Cherokee. The engine is rock solid. It's also freakishly large for a six cylinder and barely fits longitudinally in the engine compartment. Stuffing a 4.0L engine in a small 3,000 lb vehicle may have been a little overkill, but some engineers just do things right. AMC had those engineers.

"One engine to run them all"
Thinking of all the vehicles the family has had that were propelled by this 6-cylinder.

Dad's 1982 CJ7 and 1995 Grand Cherokee
Mom's 2000 Wrangler (Which we still have.)
Sister's 2000 Cherokee

What a great workhorse of an engine.

This engine was already featured once as a "workhorse" engine of the day. But, it's a pretty good one, so i have no problem with it being featured twice.

@elwood: Funny, I still get stuck using a mix of standard and metric.

Most of the tooling vendors I work with still use standard (80 mil wall thickness), but b/c it's a medical device I end up having to use a lot of dual dimensions.

Someone told me the US "officially" switched to the metric system some time in the 70s.

@muleshoe: Sounds like just what my Pacer needs...

Great motor. I had a DJ-5D (yes, Postal Jeep) with a 232 in it. 100hp on a good day, but enough torque to climb a telephone pole.

The Chrysler electronic ignition was another story.

But with a 232, 727 TorqueFlite, and a Dana 44, there wasn't much you could do to hurt that driveline.

Is it wrong to want to stick 3 Weber sidedrafts on the side of that block?

The best plan I've seen so far with this motor starts with a 1980 258 block (before they lightened it, but after they added the front diff-mount bosses for the Eagle), add a 4.0 head conversion (including the fuel injection), then add turbo- or super-charging. You can get 500 horsepower fairly easily with a cam that will still allow idling.

@VW_SollteMichAnstellen: That's actually accurate - Chrysler still sells the XJ Cherokee as the Jeep 2500 and Jeep 4000 (that's almost as impressive as the engine itself, that the same basic truck's been built for almost 25 years).

@AmishJohn: Not at all, Clifford even sells a kit....

Clifford Performance (where 6=8) is an excellent source of parts and know-how for getting max bang for the buck from these engines.

@junkman: it won't run pump gas at 12 to 1 but the dog will Hunt

@AmishJohn:
@Mike the Dog:
One caveat, though. Since the intake and exhaust manifolds are both on the same side you have to go with a header to use a side-draft carb setup.

Murilee, thanks for running this one again. This is truly a great motor.

@AmishJohn: Then it's a sin I had a home built Holly 450 CFM on the one I built...

@elwood: Talk to Abe Simpson. (I'd throw you a link to a video, but someone on youtube has gone and polticized it, dammit).

@Mad_Science: You haven't heard that story? I think it was Nixon who had the plan of doing the changeover in one fell swoop, literally overnight. Suddenly, gas was sold in liters!... for like a week. The changeover didn't take and everyone went back to gallons and inches.

I think 2L bottles of soda are one of the remnants of that attempt.

Jeep 258/4.0: 50 years of torquey goodness.

Now that I think about it, I've had 2.5 of these engines. 1992 Cherokee, 2004 Grand, 1999 Wrangler (but subtract two of the cylinders)

Great engine, lots of power & realiability, your car will die before this engine.

Stupid Chryco coud have been better just with an upgraded head & EFI

We bought a brand-new '95 Cherokee with the 4.0L engine. Never got a chance to get a feel for long-term reliability, though... Randy totaled it in a horrific accident in '97. Nothing like coming home to an empty house and seeing your partner's car a mangled wreck on the noon-time local news (from the helicopter shot, I could see the rainbow sticker on the tailgate glass, and knew that it had to be him).

Thanks to airbags and seatbelts, he suffered only bruises.

I think the only thing I didn't like about the 4.0 in my Cherokee was the IM/EM being on the same side when the exhaust manifold developed a gigantic crack between the 5/6 cylinder runners and needed to be replaced. Great truck for hooning though, automagic tranny and all.

@Mad_Science: @JB_Jeep: To be fair the 3.8l thats currently in the Wrangler is based off the 3.3L which was originally based off the good ole 318 V8.

So its not all bad.

A buddy of mine put 400K on his 4.0 Cherokee.

And Barney Navarro qualified one at Indy- great engine!

Got one of these noisy, beautiful brutes in my daily driver. Time to take the hardtop off so I can hear it better.

I absolutely love this engine, my first car was a 99 Grand Cherokee. Tons of torque. No matter what kind of driving you put that thing through it always keeps a straight faced 20 MPG, and that's towing a motorcycle or two at 70mph.

My first car was my mom's 99 Grand Cherokee (I'm only 19). I absolutely love the engine though, its got plenty of torque, and the be