Jeep Wrangler JL Transmission Cooler 2018+

Despite its simple appearance, improving upon the stock 2018+ Jeep Wrangler JL transmission cooler will take some clever engineering. In many cases, the solution to extracting more efficiency from a heat exchanger is to make it bigger, but with the cramped cooling stack of the JL, the size of our cooler would be limited.

In our last post, we looked at the stock 2018+ Jeep Wrangler JL transmission cooler and its home in the 2.0L Wrangler. Our performance trans cooler will fit all of the available engines and the 2020+ Gladiator, but the complexity of the 2.0T's cooling stack makes it the perfect R&D vehicle. That complexity also restricts how much we can change the dimensions of the transmission cooler.

With the stock transmission cooler removed, we measured the space it occupied and calculated how much larger our cooler could be. The length of the cooler is effectively fixed by the line connections on the passenger side and the mounting tabs on the driver's side. In the vertical plane,

Engines get a lot of press these days. Every manufacturer wants to flaunt their latest, most fuel-efficient, technologically advanced, or powerful engine yet. The hype is even more prominent when manufacturers make drastic changes to a long-standing model, like the 2018+ Jeep Wrangler.

When FCA announced the 2018+ Wrangler JL in late 2017, all the journalists were clamoring for headlines on the new 2.0L, turbocharged, mild-hybrid engine. How would the mild hybrid perform offroad? Would the turbo lag make it a dog in stop and go traffic? What about that 24-volt power system? Everybody forgot about the 3.6L Pentastar that's powered the Wrangler, and over 20 other models, for almost a decade. But the 3.6L Pentastar wasn't the only thing forgotten in the fanfare over the new 2.0T.

No matter the vehicle, transmissions never manage to garner the same amount of limelight that engines and other high-profile components do. Nobody wants to think about what happens after all the explosions and fun