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2022 Jeep Compass Diesel AT: 30 observations after 3 days of driving

25th March 2022, 11:19 by Rahul Nagaraj

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Jeep Compass Diesel AT Review

For the long Holi weekend, the family made a plan to go to Pawna. It was a big gang with cousins and all. What better opportunity to drive the Compass Diesel AT, which I have been keen to experience? This 400-km round trip covers all kinds of terrain, so it would be fun.

TL;DR = I’ll give the Diesel AT combination a 7 / 10 rating, deducting 1.5 points for the occasional slow response times & confused nature, and 1.5 points for not having paddle shifters or a Sport mode. The gearbox is smooth & easy to live with. If you're a calm driver or even one who pushes the car at 7/10ths, you'll be fine. I must mention the Diesel AT is not dimwitted or painful like the Compass Petrol DCT which I would give a 4 / 10 rating.
Regular people won’t have any issue with the AT gearbox at all. Even everyday enthusiasts will be fine with the Diesel AT. Diehard Team-BHPians who observe each and every gearshift and torque curves etc. will find the gearbox to be lacking, but only when they are driving h-a-r-d. As an example, on the expressway, it was still okay, but when I was flying down the Lonavala ghat, when I needed the gearbox to precisely be in the right gear - that’s where it let me down.

Jeep Compass Diesel AT Review in the City

Sit inside and this feels more like a proper German car than an Italian-American one. With the way the doors shut and that firm seat compound. The Compass feels very sturdy & incredibly solid.
Absolutely love the facelift's new interiors and the cabin does feel good. It looks amazing, very premium. The steering is thick and lovely to hold. The gear lever is like a rock-solid, chunky piece that could just as well have been the lever of a bank vault!
Having no paddle shifters at this price point is a bummer & unpardonable. What you do have behind the steering though, are very neatly placed buttons for the stereo – left side ones change the track, right side ones adjust the volume. Other manufacturers should pick this up. The arrangement is very ergonomically good and there's great attention to detail too. If you long-press the track change button, it rewinds the song being played.
Really sucks that there’s no 12V socket at the front because I needed it for a device of mine.
Quite a small boot for the price, I must say! We were a big group, so we're carrying lots of food supplies etc. The luggage had to be spilt over onto the back seat. There was no way the boot could take it all.
Driving around in the city, on the expressway and around the village roads of Pawna, the Compass made me feel like I'm driving a "mini-tank". The car has a very, very solid feel.
Drive calmly around the city or drive a little spiritedly, say pressing the throttle 60-70% of the way and you’ll find the gearbox to be smooth and fine. No issues at all for regular Ashoks.
Upshifts are executed smoothly & seamlessly.
On the other hand, drive like an enthusiast and many times, you will find the gearbox's response time to be slow. Especially in the lower gears and / or at slow speeds, there were times that I wanted to downshift and it took 1.5 seconds before the gearbox responded to my pedal-to-the-metal command! Is this slow response to kick downs a deal-breaker? No. You’ll live with it, but you’ll never rave about your gearbox’s behaviour as an enthusiast and it won’t “wow” you as a DSG would. More than the gearbox's behaviour though, the real deal-breaker of the Compass is its stiff pricing. The Compass Diesel AT range is Rs 33 - 37 lakhs OTR, Mumbai.
Has Jeep improved the tuning in the latest iteration? Well, the Diesel AT is certainly not dimwitted like the Jaguar XE’s gearbox (which is really one of the most horribly tuned ATs I have driven) or the sluggish Compass Petrol AT, but it’s not a particularly bright or intelligent auto-box either. Again, I'll give the Compass Diesel AT combo a 7 / 10 rating. I found the Seltos Diesel AT tuning to be more intuitive, where it would respond much better and pick the right gear almost all the time. The Seltos Diesel AT – now that’s a brilliantly tuned engine + gearbox combo. Other Diesel ATs that left me with a positive impression are the XUV700, Hexa, Safari, Tucson & C5 Aircross.

Jeep Compass Diesel AT Review on the Highway

This "tank" munches miles like no other on the open road:

Not only are there no paddle shifters, but the gearbox doesn’t even have a sport mode. That itself should tell you this AT is not for enthusiasts. It’s more for daily use = for commuting, for convenience, for cruising.
As said in our full Official Review, the Compass has very long legs and is a mind-blowing high-speed mile-muncher. With its excellent stability, smooth gearbox, torquey diesel engine and nice driving position, you can drive this car all day long with a smile plastered on your face.
On the expressway, you’ll find the gearbox’s behaviour to be better. It’s basically under 60 km/h, at lower revs and in tricky low-speed conditions that the gearbox gets more confused. Example? Say you suddenly slow down for a speed bump, and floor it right after. But once you are well above 2,000 rpm, the torquey engine makes the gearbox’s life easier. On the expressway, you won’t find it getting that confused or the response time to be slow. It’s at slower speeds and / or in dense traffic that you find the response time to be lacking. You'll be fine on expressways.
I like Jeep’s 80 km/h warning simply because, with my music volume, there isn’t any. I didn’t even hear it with my loud music. Other manufacturers, please take note.
On the open road and for sheer driving pleasure, the Compass Diesel 6-speed MT is more fun and a lot more effortless to drive fast. With the Diesel AT, if you want to drive fast, you have to really wring the neck of the gearbox continuously going into a kick-down mode, or use the AT's manual mode. The Diesel MT is more fun on the open road because its performance is more effortless to access.
The AT can get a bit unpredictable. On occasions, especially at higher speeds, it responds acceptably well to your downshift command. At other times, it doesn’t. In a couple of situations, I also found it to be confused and in the wrong revs. E.g. it didn’t upshift when I was driving easy and would have preferred it to. Again, these are only things that petrolheads like us would notice. The regular Ashok won't have complaints.
Drive smoothly, move with the traffic or even with the throttle at 6/10ths and you are satisfied. No complaints. Start pushing the car with the throttle at 9/10ths and you’ll find the gearbox not downshifting when you want it to and upshifting when you don’t want it to (e.g. mid-corner).
Coming down a fast ghat road, enthusiasts like us will stick to 'manual mode'. It will anyway upshift at the redline in manual mode, so you will use this mode primarily for commanding downshifts as well as holding the current gear. Although, it won't listen to your downshift commands about 1/3rd of the time (the tune is conservative).
You'll enjoy the grip levels & sorted suspension on your favourite mountain roads. The car's behaviour is very confidence-inspiring.
Equally enjoyable is the steering which is fab for an EPS. It's reasonably sharp & has just the right weight at different speeds.
Using manual mode with the gearbox requires a firm hand; it requires effort to move the lever to the left. Drive it and you'll remember my "lever of a vault door" comment.

The kind of stuff that the Diesel AT doesn’t do well. On a narrow road stuck behind a truck, you need the AT to instantly downshift to overtake. In such tricky situations, its response time is like 1.5 seconds! What did I do? Use manual mode. Here, one misses "sport" mode which would keep the engine & gearbox on the boil:

I found a very peculiar issue with the Compass Diesel AT. If you are driving hard on the open road in full auto mode, the gearbox responds / downshifts best in kick-down mode. That is, the final 10% of the accelerator pedal’s travel range. Meaning, you are continuously in kick-down mode when you want to fly. The problem with doing this is that the accelerator's travel range is long and the pedal is also on the firmer side. After doing this for an hour and a half, my right foot started aching. Solution: drive easy or switch to manual mode. "Sport" mode would've made continuous hard driving easier.
Considering the price point of this car, Jeep needs to make the NVH package more premium. Above 2,000 rpm, you feel mild vibrations on the accelerator pedal. These vibes only increase with the revs. At high revs, they are very noticeable. This is not cool in a car as expensive as the Compass.
This idling start/stop system is going to kill turbos. I needed to take a break, so after hard driving on the ghat (with the engine & turbo steaming hot), I came to a halt and instantly, the engine just switched off!!! I felt so terribly bad for the turbo.
The suspension tune is mature. Again, it has a very German car feel, behaving as if it was built for the AutoBahn. It gives good stability and driving pleasure. On the downside, you feel bad roads, bumps and potholes a lot more. This is not your soft, comfort-oriented suspension. Your family will definitely tell you to go slow on bumps & potholes.
Want to know how she will offroad? Here's Samurai's awesome 4x4 report.

Beautiful Pawna is just ~3 hours from crowded Bombay, yet it feels like you're on a different planet altogether! Leave early morning and the drive is very, very enjoyable:

The boot is too small for the price:

Our weekend luggage spilt over to the backseat:

Objects in the rearview mirror are sexier than they appear:

I saw these cars and thought, wow, India sure has some great automobiles on sale now. The Innova Crysta, Carnival, Creta & Vento are all fantastic machines. I also find it ironical that the full-size full-on luxury van in this image (Carnival) starts at a price lower than the small SUV I'm driving:

We had a sweet line-up of rides at the Pawna house. W221 is a decade old & my cousin intends to keep it for another handful of years. My philosophy of buying a more expensive car & keeping it for longer infectiously spreads within the family. It's his daily drive & he spends Rs 2 - 3 lakhs every year on the upkeep & maintenance; way cheaper than Rs 2 crores for a new S-Class! The car is still acceptably reliable:

The humble Bolero (proudly belongs to the family that takes care of the Pawna house) might be the cheapest car here, yet it has undeniable character! With that boxy body & black tints, all it needs are alloys with fat tyres to become a head-turner (check out this bad boy):

My kid brother's limousine perhaps has the perfect (soft) suspension for this village's broken roads. Road quality has overall improved though. Neither the S-Class nor the Superb scraped anywhere on the way to Pawna. Compare that to the time we went in the 530d: