Jeep Grand Cherokee ZJ

The Grand Cherokee made its entrance by driving through a wall. At the 1992 Detroit auto show, Chrysler president Bob Lutz pointed a prototype ZJ at the convention center's plate glass and drove straight through it onto the stage, which tells you exactly how much confidence Jeep had in its first Grand Cherokee. It backed up the theater with a proper unibody, available V8 power, and the kind of on-road polish the segment hadn't seen.

For us 90's kids, this is probably the Jeep we saw most often. It looked to me like a pretty pedestrian SUV that couldn't decide if it wanted to be old-school boxy or new-school sleek, but it was actually a pretty souped-up machine for the era. Jeep dropped in the 5.9-liter Magnum V8 from the Ram truck lineup, good for 245 horsepower and 345 lb-ft, and the result hit 60 mph in about 6.8 seconds. In 1998 that made it the quickest SUV you could buy, trading blows with muscle cars while wearing leather and fake wood (which objectively rules).

The 5.9 Limited is a 'luxury' Jeep with a muscle-car heart. The regular V8 ZJs are the sleeper bargain; the 5.9 is the one for the real SUV historian.