Throwback Thursday—The New Black: A Ducati Monster 821 by Rough Crafts

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Smoky Blue: An Unassailable 1954 Panhead Bobber from Infinity Inc.

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Bandit9’s (RED)800: A 110-HP Ducati-Powered Custom for a Cause

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Basement to Barber: Marekswerk’s BMW R 100 Café Racer

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Midnight in the Mojave: An Old-School Triumph Sled from 1984SC

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Weathering the Storm: 5 Custom Motorcycles from the Builder's Best Show at BMW Motorrad Days

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Paint It Black: A Warranty-Backed T120 Scrambler by FCR Original

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Natural Selection: A Space-Grade, Flax-Fiber Buell S1 Tribute

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Milwaukee Muscle: Bike EXIF’s Top 11 Harley Customs of 2022

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Daily Stunner: A Kawasaki ER-6F by Cowboy's Chopper

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Day and Night: Radically improving the CB750 Nighthawk

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Throwback Thursday—The Bison: Revival's Custom BMW R nineT

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Jeep Compass 4xe Has 375 HP – but the Interesting Part Isn’t the Horsepower

Jeep could have taken the easy route with the new Compass 4xe. Give it more power than the regular versions, add some tougher-looking bumpers, talk about electrification and call it the performance model of the range.

Instead, quite a lot of attention has gone into what happens when the pavement ends.

The new Compass 4xe produces 375 hp, which makes it the most powerful Compass yet. That’s a slightly ridiculous figure when you remember where this model started – the Compass was never supposed to be Jeep’s muscle car. But horsepower isn’t really the reason this version stands apart from the rest of the range.

2026 Jeep Compass 4xe

It’s the hardware underneath.

Jeep has given the 4xe a proper mechanical connection to the rear axle, together with a dedicated low-range function. That’s a different philosophy from simply adding an electric motor at the back and using software to create all-wheel drive whenever the front wheels need some help.

For a Jeep, that distinction feels important.

Plenty of modern crossovers now arrive with black wheel-arch trim, driving modes called things like “Mud” and “Snow” and photographs of the car parked beside a mountain. Most of them will spend their lives dealing with wet supermarket car parks and the occasional gravel driveway. The Compass will probably do exactly the same thing for many owners, but Jeep still seems determined to make sure the hardware can back up the image.

Throughout 2026, the company has been showing what the new Compass can do through its Capability Stories series, with another installment arriving on October 2. The 4xe gets specific calibration for loose surfaces, along with changes intended to make it more useful once grip becomes unpredictable.

None of this turns it into a Wrangler. Nor should it.

2026 Jeep Compass 4xe

The Compass still has to work as an ordinary European C-segment SUV for the other 99 percent of its life. People are going to commute in it, carry children in it and spend considerably more time looking for a parking space than climbing a rocky trail. Making it miserable on the road just to prove a point off it would be rather pointless.

That’s why the combination is interesting. You get the technology and packaging expected from a modern family SUV, but underneath there is more than a collection of electronic driving modes pretending to be off-road hardware.

Will most owners ever find its limits? Probably not. Then again, plenty of people buy cars capable of 250 km/h and never see the far side of 150. Pickup owners don’t necessarily tow at maximum capacity every Tuesday either.

Sometimes knowing the ability is there is part of what you’re paying for.

The 375-hp output will inevitably make the headlines because it is an easy number to understand, and being able to call this the most powerful Compass ever built certainly won’t hurt Jeep’s marketing department. I’m just not convinced it’s the most interesting number attached to the car.

A Compass with 375 hp is amusing.

A modern electrified Compass whose engineers still cared about what happens when one wheel is hanging in the air says considerably more about what Jeep wants the 4xe badge to mean.

And that’s probably how it should be.

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Moana: Catching the Drift With a Kawasaki W650 Street Tracker

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Battle of The Twins Redux: A 310-pound BMW Race Bike

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Battle of The Twins Redux: A 310-pound BMW race bike

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Flashback Friday: Top 8 Custom Motorcycles of October 2023

For this week’s Flashback Friday, we are diving deep into the Bike EXIF archives...

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Throwback Thursday—Trail Breaker: K-Speed Mods the Newest (and Littlest) XSR

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How to Get a Bronco in a Custom Color, and What Each Option Costs

There are three ways to end up with a Bronco in a color Ford does not sell on the standard order sheet. They cost very different amounts, they last very different lengths of time, and the reason for that difference is chemistry rather than craftsmanship.

Option	Cost	Lasts	Time
Ford Desert Rising package	$13,695	Permanent	Order and wait
Vinyl wrap (truck or SUV)	$4,000 to $8,000	5 to 7 years	3 to 5 days
Color-change paint	$4,000 to $15,000	10 to 15 years	7 to 14 days

The factory package

Ford announced the Bronco Desert Rising Edition as the first entry in a new range called the Horizon Series. The inspiration is genuine and rather good.

Utah’s Great Salt Lake turns an almost neon pink in high summer. The cause is biological. As water levels drop, salinity climbs past the point where most life can cope, and the organisms that remain are halophilic archaea and salt-tolerant algae. Those organisms produce carotenoid pigments, the same family of compounds that make carrots orange and flamingos pink, and they use them to absorb sunlight and shield their cells from it. Concentrate enough of them in a shrinking body of water and the lake changes color. The nearby Coral Pink Sand Dunes carry a similar saturation from iron oxide in the eroded sandstone.

The package costs $13,695 and is ordered on the Outer Banks trim through Ford’s Custom Garage. It adds pink and magenta decals across the exterior, pink treatment on the Bronco lettering and part of the grille, and magenta interior seating surfaces.

What it does not add is pink paint. The package is available on four exterior colors, and those are Oxford White, Shadow Black, Avalanche Gray, and Ruby Red.

So the pink Bronco Ford will sell you is a white, black, grey or red truck wearing pink graphics. The execution looks sharp and the limited-edition status is real, but it is a decal package on a standard color at nearly fourteen thousand dollars. If you assumed you were ordering a pink vehicle, order it knowing what arrives.

Wrapping

A full color-change wrap runs $2,500 to $7,000 on most vehicles, with trucks and SUVs landing around $4,000 to $8,000. Chrome, satin and color-shift films push past $10,000. A professional wrap takes three to five days and lasts five to seven years with hand washing and garage parking.

The five to seven year figure is not arbitrary. Cast vinyl films are plasticized, meaning small molecules are blended into the polymer to keep it flexible enough to conform to curves. Those plasticizers migrate out over time, accelerated by heat and ultraviolet light, and the film gradually stiffens, shrinks and loses its grip on the panel edges. Florida sun does this faster than Michigan sun. That is also why removal gets harder the longer you wait, since brittle film tears into small pieces instead of pulling away in sheets and leaves adhesive that takes hours to clean.

The number that catches people out is door jambs. A standard wrap stops at the outer edge of the door, so the original color is sitting right there every time someone gets in. The jambs run another $500 to $1,500 and require partial door disassembly. On a subtle color change you can skip it. On white to pink you cannot, and a truck that skipped it looks unfinished forever.

Budget for the rest of the ownership too. Vinyl-specific ceramic coating costs $400 to $900 and slows the plasticizer loss. Removal later runs $500 to $1,000. Upkeep runs around $150 a year.

The real product with a wrap is reversibility. The factory paint sits untouched underneath, which protects resale and means you can change your mind.

Painting

A quality color-change respray runs $4,000 to $15,000. Color changes cost 30 to 60 percent more than a same-color respray, because the shop has to cover door jambs, engine bay edges, trunk edges and the fuel filler area so the original color never shows through. Expect seven to fourteen days, and ten to fifteen years of life from good work.

Paint outlasts vinyl because the protective layer is a different kind of material. A modern basecoat and clearcoat system cures into a cross-linked polymer network, which means the molecules are chemically bonded to each other rather than simply mixed together. Nothing needs to migrate out to keep it flexible, and the clear layer carries ultraviolet absorbers that take the damage instead of the color underneath.

Avoid the bottom of the market entirely. A $500 to $1,000 respray uses single-stage paint with no clear coat, sands inadequately, and tapes over trim rather than removing it. With no sacrificial clear layer, ultraviolet exposure attacks the pigment directly, which is why that work fades or peels within two to five years. You pay twice for the same job.

Paint is the right answer when this is the color the truck keeps, when you are holding it for a decade, and when you want the depth that clear-coated paint has and vinyl does not quite reach.

Which one for a custom build

Paint, in almost every case, and the reason is timing rather than preference.

A truck going to a shop for suspension, wheels and interior work is already coming apart. Jambs, edges and the engine bay are far cheaper to cover when the panels are off anyway, which removes the main cost penalty that makes a color change expensive on an assembled vehicle.

Someone commissioning a full build is also not planning to change the color in three years, which removes the main argument for wrapping. The reversibility you are paying for with vinyl is worth very little on a truck that has already been permanently modified in a dozen other ways.

What to check on a finished truck

If you are buying something already built rather than commissioning it, four questions settle most of it. Was it painted or wrapped. Were the door jambs done. What paint system was used, and is there a clear coat over it. How long ago was the work completed.

Then open a door before agreeing to anything. Jambs are where corner-cutting shows up first, and they are the fastest way to tell a proper color change from a cheap one. Check the edges around the fuel filler and the underside of the hood while you are there.

Paint handled inside the build beats paint handled afterward, for the timing reason above. FL Auto Sales Group, a Tampa builder, produces custom Ford Broncos in colors Ford does not offer, pink among them, and ships nationwide through carriers who handle specialty vehicles, which matters if the truck you want is not in your state.  Ask any builder whether the color work happened during the build or after it. The answer usually explains the price.

The color is the part everyone photographs. It is also the part where the difference between eight thousand dollars and eighty thousand miles of sun exposure shows up first.

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