Wanna see how fast a jeep Gladiator can go when it’s given an entire salt flat to play in?
Deliveries of the new Jeep Gladiator are just starting across America, and that means it’s time for us to see what these mid-size pickup truck can really do. One such Gladiator was sent to YouTuber TheStradman who has some big plans on swapping the engine with something a little bit more powerful.
But in the meantime, he’s gotta get a good baseline on how well the Gladiator performs. And what better way to get a performance indicator than by taking it to the Utah desert and seeing how fast it can go when given miles of open gravel?
It looks like Mr. Stradman took his Gladiator to a former lake in the deserts of Utah. It’s not quite the Bonneville Salt Flats, an area famous for extreme speeds and extremely flat, salt-packed earth, but it’ll certainly do for an off-road pickup like the Gladiator.
Armed with a 3.6-L Pentastar V6 engine with 285 horsepower, 260 lb-ft of torque, and all-terrain tires, this Gladiator is more than capable of achieving some extreme speeds on this extreme surface. And by extreme, we mean an entirely reasonable 97 mph (or roughly 156 kph).
As is common with modern vehicles, FCA limits the power on this puppy once it gets close to the redline at its top-most gear. Around 100 mph is pretty typical for a limiter on a pickup truck, so the Gladiator’s inability to breach the 3-digits of speed doesn’t come as too much of a surprise.
Those looking for a faster Gladiator will have to figure out a way of doing it themselves. FCA have previously indicated that the Gladiator will get the 3.0-L diesel from the Ram 1500 and Wrangler JL, but the Hellcat engine is a little too tight a fit for it to pass safety tests.
That’s not stopping people from swapping out for a Hellcat engine themselves, safety be damned. A California tuner already has a Hellcat-powered Gladiator with a tent on its bed, and Hennessey has announced their own 1,000-horsepower Gladiator Maximus 1000.