Wow Sarge, I had no idea you left so near me. I wonder if your experience with the dealer and trying to get problems fixed? Is that all similar to mine. I assume you're dealing with the dealer in IF like I am correct? I only have about a third of the issues you encounter, but I'm quite tired of taking it in each time the seat moves and leans back at random times while backing out of my driveway or parking spaces at work, only to have a service department tell me they recalibrated it and reset it again but found no problem. The last time I insisted they open a star case but they didn't do it. I'm not as concerned about the memory positions getting screwed up every few weeks, which it has done consistently since we purchased it last November. But I feel like the seat moving back two or three inches and reclining halfway down at random when backing the vehicle up is a genuine safety concern.
We too have problem with defrost being ineffective unless on max, and the console being excruciatingly hot whenever using the heat along with drafts of cold air at least for front passengers. I found several parts of the ducting loose, and the dealer now claims everything is tight and assembled as it should be. This summer the AC was not cooling the air well and the dealer did find refrigerant leak. The after the new line came in and they recharged the system the air conditioning works better than it ever has. I have high hopes defrost will work better this winter. My build a date is 9/21, I wonder if yours is anywhere close and might share some defective parts.
Another issue ours has is at idle. A long enough trip to heat. The engine bay, we get a pretty strong thumping and vibration under the passenger footpan, which sounds a bit reminiscent of a helicopter. Unfortunately the dealer can never reproduce this. One time when it was particularly noisy I was close enough to the dealership to drop in. I got the service writer that has been handling all my issues to come ride with me to hear it. Unfortunately he told me the technician had gone home for the day so he told me I'd have to bring it back when it was acting up again for the technician to hear.
I have many of the issues with the 10-in Uconnect unit losing and changing settings at random, many of the behaviors you have noticed about features turning on or not working sometimes align with my experience. In many instances, the display doesn't reflect the state the feature is in, but toggling the setting back and forth will get it into a state where it works again. The service writer has been telling me since my late July appointment, that a software update is just around the corner that solves my problems with memory, radio features, and the problems with wireless carplay/Android Auto. He said the same thing 3 weeks later when I scheduled the next appointment for the seat trying to put me into sleeping position while backing out of the driveway onto the road. When picking up the vehicle after my September appointment I asked again if they looked into the update, and was told that mine is current and the latest version is mY21-R17.98. I reminded him that my unit was at MY21-R17.99 and that he's been telling me for months and update should be coming soon.
Maybe it's time for me to find a different dealer, as additionally, during my September appointment they did my first oil change, and after the short drive home when I parked it in my garage I noticed a bunch of smoke rolling out from under my hood. I quickly backed out of the garage, opened the hood and determined it was just oil, not an engine fire. After the smoke dissipated, I was preparing to clean up a ton of spilled oil and discovered that the dealership had managed to lose one of the bolts for my engine cover, strip out the threads in the mount for the other engine cover bolt, and had left a half quart or more of oil trapped in the gussets of the intake manifold and other various nooks in the top of the engine. I called the dealership back and talked to my service writer just before closing time and he said: "Oh I should have told you about that. I pressure washed it twice, and thought I got it cleaned up".
Maybe I need to take it to a different dealer, and maybe I should consider pursuing a buyback after all. In comparison, my 2012 Grand Cherokee has been absolutely flawless since we bought it new and we haven't done anything other than oil changes, tires, front shocks, and one new windshield.
I did have to replace the windshield on the 2021 Grand Cherokee L in August. It was quite expensive and Mopar was the only glass option at that time.
I live in Jackson, so mine goes to Yeti Jeep over here. I have absolutely nothing but the best things to say about everyone at the dealership I've worked with. The GM, Erika Olsen has been wonderful, Tony and the other sales people are great. I don't know that we have the best prices on new cars necessarily b/c Jackson is such an absurdly wealthy town, and they're also a small dealership, but they're all really good people. My service guy, Seth, has been absolutely fantastic with all of this, but the problem is this is a new model and, as a car guy myself who has worked on a lot of my own cars/boats/RVs over the years, I totally understand when they can't figure something out - they open cases with the 'STAR Techs', I provide video documentation, etc... but when
JEEP can't figure it out, they can't help my dealer techs either... They have always done excellent work, provided loaners, brought the car to my house and/or picked it up, etc though.
The real trouble is this: A friend of mine, who recently retired from Autoliv, and who lead development teams on everything from the Google and Apple cars to just about every major manufacturer, said this: 'FCA was one of the hardest companies to work with, because compared to any other big manufacturer, they do the least amount of in-house tech development, and their engineers think you can just plug in all these different systems as though they are as simple as legos, and nothing could be further from the truth. So when things don't work right, they have a harder time than anyone else solving the problems, and they take a lot longer to figure it all out - after production has started.'
So, a lot of the glitches may have hardware defects at the root, but the software code isn't robust enough to work around isolated failures, and you end up with all kinds of strange problems like I have. Some cars, where everything is put together right, work perfectly. But throw a digital wrench in things and you're screwed until they figure it out. Buying a first model year is signing up to be a beta tester, no exaggeration. Before my dealer got the updated scan tool for the WL from Jeep (last Dec/Jan), he was showing a few modules throwing codes, and with the new module plugged in, he said "holy shit! there's all kinds of errors!" (I was sitting next to him when he plugged it in). Now, it's not that there are actually defects with all those modules, it can be just one or two modules causing everything to collapse, and the software isn't sufficiently developed to work around the individual failures. Also, because they're running so many different types of signals over the low voltage bus system, any defects in the connections or wiring harness can trigger all sorts of random things. I think my car, in part, needs a new wiring harness to have any hope of ever working right. My problems are so widely varied, and so random, there's not much else to explain it, unless I really do have a whole bunch of defective modules.
Another person I've been talking to said there was a problem with the seat memory module that would create various problems with the memory setting retention, and could maybe create or be involved in what's going on with your seats, so that's the first place I'd look. Jeep knows about it at the corporate level. It was a problem with earlier builds, and has been rectified now per someone who definitely knows. Updating the code could be enough to fix it, or you may need a new module. It could also be something else, of course.
I think mine was built in October or something, I bought it 12/5/21. So it's around the same time as yours.
It's a bit of a drive to Jackson from IF, but maybe there's a dealer in Pocatello or somewhere you could try. Your dealer sounds like garbage, honestly. I've got nothing but good things to say about my dealer here. They just can't fix the car if Jeep doesn't know what to tell them either.
