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Depends how old you are. Up through the 80s, Jeep still had a reputation as a rock-solid, durable brand. (The reality probably changed sometime in the 1970s, but it takes time for word to get out.) A lot of people's mental model is set somewhere in their 20s/30s, and they never really update it. So a lot of baby boomers still think of Jeep as a reliable car.

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That's what I was getting at, though I wasn't sure if my perceptions matched the general consensus (which it seems they do).

If a manufacturer has been broadly considered as unreliable for the past 20-40 years (JK's came out in 2007, and I still heard some people talking about jeeps as being reliable in the TJ era, though I'd personally disagree), I think it's fair to say they have a reputation of being unreliable.

Among my dads friends (lawyers) in the 80s none of them would buy a jeep because they consistently died between 60k and 80k miles. one of them had one but he expected to only put 30k on it on his property. We had to pull it with a tractor on multiple hunts because the 4wd system wouldn't work.

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