2026 Jeep Grand Cherokee - Boxier, Powered By Four-Cylinder Engine

DETROIT – The 2026 Jeep Grand Cherokee, which the company unveiled on Oct. 28, was released with a slightly modernized, boxier look and a built-from-scratch turbocharged four-cylinder engine Stellantis is calling the Hurricane 4.

“We are making so many changes to this brand, quickly,” Jeep CEO Bob Broderdorf said as he was unveiling the 2026 Grand Cherokee at a news media event, noting that this marks the third revived or redesigned vehicle Jeep has released in 2025.

The Grand Cherokee, though, is an important piece of the Jeep brand and Jeep’s parent company, Stellantis.

“(The Grand Cherokee is) the No. 1 volume driver, not just for the Jeep brand, but for all of Stellantis,” Broderdorf said.

For the 2026 model year, Jeep will offer several trim levels of the Grand Cherokee in two- and three-row configurations (with three rows reserved for the Grand Cherokee L, the longer wheelbase version of the car) as well as three different powertrains.

The entry-level Grand Cherokee trim levels, the Laredo and Laredo X, come with the 3.6L Pentastar V6 engine, but for the next trim levels up, Jeep is offering fewer cylinders but more power and fuel efficiency with the company’s brand-new Hurricane 4 engine.

Jeep has not yet announced when the new Grand Cherokees will be available for sale, nor has it released the price.

Smaller than a penny

The new turbocharged Hurricane 4 engine offers 324 horsepower and 332 pound-feet of torque while incorporating fuel-injection technology from Maserati’s F1 racing lineage.

Inside the engine, at the top of the cylinders, is a small, machined copper piece that is smaller in diameter than a penny and about as tall as a thimble. The device is part of the engine’s turbulent jet ignition (TJI) system, which has been adapted from racing engines designed for Maserati.

The small copper piece is a pre-chamber for an air-fuel mixture that, when injected, is ignited by one or two spark plugs (at certain power levels, the Hurricane 4 will run with two spark plugs per chamber).

Micky Bly, Stellantis’ head of global propulsion systems, said the technology allows the Hurricane 4 engine to strike a balance between high power output and low fuel consumption. The small piece disperses fuel quickly and allows for high efficiency.

Bly has been a part of the development of the Hurricane 4 project since it began in 2021 and said that pulling 324 horsepower out of a 2L engine reminded him of how far automotive engineering has come. When he began at Stellantis in 1992, he said, “I was trying my best to scrape out 300 horsepower in a 5.7-liter (engine).”

Now, Bly is rolling out a two-liter engine that is a third of the displacement size of that V8 and producing more power while burning much less fuel.

“To think that we went from a 5.7-liter to a little bitty two-liter now … that is making more power than we did just a couple of generations ago, tells you where two-liter technology is at,” Bly said.

Part of the high-performance of the engine, Bly said, is due to the TJI technology, which will be the auto industry’s first mass-produced, consumer-facing application of the pre-chamber combustion technology. When asked about whether technology from racing engines can be reliable in consumer vehicles, Bly said he is confident the Hurricane 4 will be dependable, even with the new device.