It isn’t unusual for automotive companies, and sometimes even individual digital artists, to heavily modify the appearances of a car to make it something cool. It happens all the time in forums and fan groups, and on occasion, they make their way out into the world where people believe these odd renderings could become a reality, like the Hellcat Widebody Wagon. But some cars, like the Jeep Gladiator, are real production cars, but they never quite stop looking like a rendering or a concept.

The Jeep Gladiator looks like a rendering

If you’ve seen a Jeep Gladiator in real life, chances are you’ve been a bit confused, even if you know what it is. It’s like a mullet in the car world – Wrangler upfront, truck behind, and it might just be everything the Jeep brand needed. Perhaps it looks so much like a rendering because the engineers at Jeep were able to create a car that looked, well, exactly how we expected it to. Seeing them in person is still rather surreal, as appearance-wise, the Jeep Gladiator does look like the original renderings of a Jeep Wrangler with a truck bed attached.

It fits in all too well

If the Jeep Gladiator is everything that Jeep enthusiasts have been waiting to brag about, they surely aren’t disappointed. While it’s easy to say that the Gladiator looks like a Wrangler with a truck bed, it’s hard to imagine any world where a pickup truck from the brand would really look much different. Despite different opinions that people may have over the appearance, there is much more to the Gladiator than meets the eye.

More than a Jeep Wrangler

By now, most people have realized that the Jeep Gladiator is much more than an extended Jeep Wrangler. The Gladiator has the full frame of a true truck and merely boasts the popular and iconic Wrangler front fascia and styling cues to help the vehicle fit into an ever-changing lineup of capable pickup trucks while standing out from the crowd.

To some people, the 2021 Jeep Gladiator might be something refreshing, but it is hard to deny that it looks like a real-life version of a concept rendering — and maybe, that’s a good thing. Tying together the attractiveness of the Wrangler with the utility of a truck bed without losing off-road capabilities earns Jeep a bravo from many fans, even if it will still take some time for us to get used to seeing them on the roads.