Short-Cab Pickup Trucks Are the Best Easter Jeep Safari Concepts This Year

Easter Jeep Safari takes over Moab, Utah this week where thousands of Jeepers will gather and the company itself trots out some concept ideas. The post Short-Cab Pickup Trucks Are the Best Easter Jeep Safari Concepts This Year appeared first on The Drive.

Apr 11, 2025 - 15:01

Short-Cab Pickup Trucks Are the Best Easter Jeep Safari Concepts This Year

Today we’ve got seven new Easter Jeep Safari concept vehicles to check out. They’re all Wrangler– and Gladiator-based this year, and the most interesting are a pair of single-cab pickup trucks. One’s retro, one’s techno, and they’re both pretty cool if a bit mild. Another highlight is a new take on an old J-10 style grille mounted onto a Gladiator.

Easter Jeep Safari takes over Moab, Utah this week as it does annually this time of year. It’s one of America’s biggest calendared gatherings of Jeep dorks and their rubber duckies, with trail rides run by Red Rock 4-Wheelers and major support from the Jeep brand itself. Off-road aftermarket companies usually show up in force, too. Jeep’s design team traditionally trots out a small fleet of concept vehicles—heavily modded production models showcasing designers’ fantasy ideas and consumer-ready Jeep Performance Parts. Some touches even make it to production models.

Before launching a new color, wheel option, or accessory, Jeep will sometimes sneak it into an EJS concept to gauge crowd and media response. As for this year’s fleet of concepts, we’ve got seven.

Jeep J6 Honcho Concept

My favorite 2025 EJS rig is the most anachronistic and simple, which will surprise exactly nobody who knows me at all. The Jeep J6 Honcho concept “mixes the classic late-1970s Jeep Honcho theme complete with production Jeep Performance Parts and accessories from Mopar,” as Jeep put it in a press release.

This thing firmly confirms one of my longest-held beliefs: A single-cab truck with stripes will always look good. Based on a four-door Jeep Rubicon (not a Gladiator truck), it’s got a custom cab and six-foot cargo box. Other than that, it’s a pretty casual build with big tires and a little lift kit. I know Jeep wouldn’t have sold many two-door Gladiators, but I sure wish it had.

Jeep Bug Out 4xe

The other new EJS rig that caught my eye is the opposite take on a two-door Jeep truck. It has strong sci-fi vibes. The classic Jeep grille contrasted with some scaffolding-looking elements and the yellow highlights over grey give it an analog future look that makes me think of Star Wars (the original three) or Aliens (the James Cameron one). Couldn’t you see this thing parked next to that labor mech Sigourney Weaver fights an alien queen in?

There’s no mention of anything like that in Jeep’s press material, so I don’t think it’s what the company was going for—the Bug Out is just supposed to be an overland rig. It’s simply “lightweighted to reflect what a responsible, modern-day mobile campsite could be,” in Jeep’s words. Like the Honcho it was based on a four-door Wrangler, cut-up and stripped down to become a two-door truck with a big cargo area and a roof spanning the whole body.

Jeep Convoy Concept

The Convoy concept’s interesting feature is its grille and hood. That general style was seen on classics like the original Wagoneer and pre-XJ Cherokee, though Jeep’s officially invoking the J-truck here (which makes sense, since this is a pickup). The Jeep J-10 and its variants were Jeep’s large pickup trucks from the mid-1970s to the late ’80s, before the XJ-style Comanche and long before today’s Gladiator. Those trucks had longer beds and typically lower ride heights than the Jeep Scrambler, which was also an ’80s baby but had more of the Jeep Wrangler style people are familiar with.

While the J-truck was suited for work, the CJ-based Scrambler was more of an adventure rig. The “Wrangler” name came with Jeep’s next era, during the second half of the ’80s.

The canvas roof over the cargo area is also kind of interesting. Otherwise, I’m not really sure what Jeep was going for with the Convoy concept. It’s kind of an odd combination of design elements on top of comically oversized (40-inch) tires.

How Many More EJS Concepts Will We Get?

The rest of the 2025 Easter Jeep concepts aren’t bad, but they’re also not particularly memorable. The Blueprint concept is a cute but aggressively corporate idea—it’s just a Wrangler loaded with pretty much every accessory Jeep sells. There are QR codes on all the parts so people can scan-click-buy right from downtown Moab where this thing will be parked. Also, it’s blue. There’s a purple and pink one called Rewind, squeezing whatever’s left of nostalgia for the ’80s and ’90s radical vibe that had a chokehold on us last decade. Then we’ve got the Sunchaser, which pretty much looks like any modded Jeep (though, take a look at the light bar—Mopar’s calling it the “ILLUMINAT3 off-road pivoting light bar accessory concept” and it’s very cool). Finally, there’s one more ’70s/early-’80s-looking Gladiator called the High Top Honcho. I like the idea of it, but the two-door version is just way prettier to me. Scroll down for some galleries of those vehicles.

Frankly, I’m impressed that Jeep’s design people were able to convince their corporate overlords to give them time and money to make Easter Jeep concepts at all this year. Jeep parent company Stellantis is facing challenging times, along with the rest of the auto industry. And if the stock market keeps mulching all our 401(k)s, the middle class is not going to be splurging on toys like high-end Jeeps and steel bars to bolt to them. EJS 2055 could just be a bunch of dudes in flip-flops and flat-brim hats wandering around Moab’s one main street, handing each other rubber duckies.

Jeep’s also lost one of this event’s biggest champions: Recently retired design boss Mark Allen. Allen was the idea man behind many of Jeep’s wildest and most special EJS showcase vehicles over the years. I met him a few times to discuss his work, and I don’t think anyone would disagree with me saying that he brought a lot of strong creative energy to Jeep’s design team. This is only the second EJS without him. I don’t mean to disparage Jeep’s current design people; between Allen’s absence and what I’m sure was a limited budget (and no new model to play with), creating cool EJS rigs this year would have been a very challenging task.

So while this crop of Easter Jeep Safari concept rigs might not be the most epic, it’s still nice to see a brand having a little bit of fun before the auto industry is completely immolated.