Wrecking valuable cars has been the basis of several scenes in iconic movies. Take, for example, the wrecking of Cameron’s father’s Ferrari GT California Spyder in Ferris Buller’s Day Off. Even the makers of the movie felt it unnecessary to destroy a valuable car and used a copy to fool their audience. The members of the YouTube channel, BackyardBroncos, have fallen foul of the enthusiasts of the Jeep brand because of their latest prank. The YouTube channel received almost 7,000 views for a video depicting the members destroying a rare Jeep model. To be fair to the YouTubers, the model they purchased cost just $400 and probably did not seem to be a rare vehicle. The Jeep Grand Cherokee ZJ is the base model of a trim level used between 1991 and 1998. The BackyardBroncos uploaded a series of videos showing them inflicting several types of damage on the car they believed to have little monetary value.

The series of videos featuring the Jeep Grand Cherokee ZJ included the removal of the roof of the Jeep to turn it into a convertible. Other videos in the series included the vehicle having beer and coins poured into its coolant tank before driving. Eventually, the BackyardBroncos drive the Jeep Grand Cherokee ZJ over a ramp and destroyed the vehicle completely. You may be asking why there is such uproar about a group of YouTubers destroying a used Jeep from the mid-90s? The answer is that the model chosen is one of the rarest and most sought-after among followers of the Jeep brand.

The iconic nature of the ZJ is driven by the way the base model of the Grand Cherokee line was manufactured in the 90s. Jeep Grand Cherokees of the mid-90s were not manufactured to the high quality we see today. Instead, the Jeep brand became synonymous with transmission failures and problems with the interior electrical system. The blogger, David Tracy, set out the argument for preserving the Jeep Grand Cherokee ZJ in a recent post and explained its five-speed manual transmission made it the “holy grail” of mid-90s Grand Cherokee’s. By the mid-90s, Jeep had begun to buy in their automatic transmissions from Chrysler. The Chrysler transmissions were quickly found to fail consistently and dragged the reputation of the Grand Cherokee down. However, the manual transmission models continued to be made by Jeep and offered a level of reliability not available with the Chrysler automatic gearbox. Jeep enthusiasts understand the failure of the interior electronics system was another common fault and spend their time looking for manual interior models. The XJ destroyed by the BackyardBroncos appears to have included many of the features sought-after by Jeep enthusiasts. Only 1,500 of the manual transmission Grand Cherokee XJ’s were manufactured meaning they are among the rarest models available.