Took the Commander for it's first trip to the North West of Western Australia at the start of August for a little over a week camping, surfing and fishing. When i departed the commander had a little under 1500km on the clock, only mods at this point in time where the kings/bilstein lift and fitment of 265/70R17 Yokohama Geolander ATS tyres.
Probabaly had around 750kg of gear aboard comprising boat, trailer and camping gear. On the way there I was getting 15.1 l/100km @ 110 km/h on the trip computer, however this was being skewed by the larger tyres. using the 10km distance markers on the side of the road the trip meter was returning 9.2km. So calculated back this equaled around 13.5 - 13.8 L/100km, I verified this also when filling the tank up at the servo. The vehicle pulled this load easy, didn't even know it was there.
TFinally getting off the highway the tracks into the station are very corrigated, and this is where the first problem started. Suddenly my check engine light came on, shortly followed by the ESP and BAS lights and "Service 4WD system". At this point I kinda shrugged it off as the car was behaving normal and was eating up anything I threw at it offroad.
None of these warnings went away during my stay, once back on the highway i tried to use the cruise control but it no longer functioned. Upon returned I took the vehicle to the jeep dealer (utterly useless) who advised after 1.5 hours of me sitting around "The vehicle showed 20 fault codes, we have reset them, if they come back bring the car back." Sure enough after 1km down the rode the codes popped up again. Taking the car back i basically got extremely poor service again, but booked the car to be looked at again 1 week later. Later that night i noticed the brake lights werent working nor the tail lights. My first thought was fuses and next day I replaced 2 fuses, the brake light and another along the lines of "tow lights". It turns out the corrigations probably caused a wire of my tail lights to arc out.
As soon as the fuses were replaced all the lights disappeared and the car works fine again, good work local jeep dealership
Dispite that little problem I was extremely pleased with the way the vehicle pulled the load and handled off road.
So the next mods will be a wheel caddy (as I see no way to fit the larger spare tyre under the floor pan) aswell as a nudge bar and set of spot lights. Problem is my commander has the parking sensors, has anyone tried or found away to trick or earth out the front ones for a nudge bar?
First Commander trip away- The good, the problems and lessons learnt
