It’s so deceptive, the ease with which we convince ourselves we could build any one of the Jeep concepts we see at the Easter Jeep Safari. Yet we do it every year. A couple years ago it was the Mighty FC, the modern interpretation of the 50-year-old Jeep Forward Control. Heck, that one was based on a Jeep Wrangler, mostly, and all we’d a’ had ta’ do was move the cab all the way front, reroute the steering, stretch the wheelbase, add a set of MOPAR portal axles, King coilover assemblies, TeraFlex control arms, track bars and four 40-inch tires mounted on custom Hutchinson 17-inch beadlock wheels. How hard could that be?

We never did any of that.

Which didn’t deter us from thinking the same thing about a couple of the new Easter Jeep Safari concepts we saw this year. On a Jeep jaunt to Moab last week where we drove all over Hell’s Half Acre (aka Eastern Utah) in a Cherokee Trailhawk (more on that in a later post), we got a chance to drive five of the seven 2015 Jeep concepts. Granted, we just drove them on a very short loop on private property and never once got any of them in four-wheel low nor anywhere close to it. But still, it’s good to see Jeep building concepts that you can actually drive. We’d like to see some of these in production. Here they are in the order in which we drove them.

The Chief is based on a four-door JK Wrangler Unlimited.

This one was love at first sight and is still our favorite. It seemed to be everyone else’s favorite, too. A woman who saw it on our drive demanded she be allowed to buy it right there on the spot.

“I want that Jeep now!” she said in a tone that suggested she usually got what she wanted in about the timeframe she mentioned. We fled the scene as fast as The Chief’s 3.6-liter Pentastar V6 could start and we could engage the six-speed manual transmission.

The Chief is based on the platform and running gear of a four-door JK Wrangler Unlimited. The rest of it is all Jeep Design’s interpretation of the original Cherokee Chief.

“Everything’s redone except the front doors,” said Jeep designer Jeff Hammoud.

Hammoud and colleagues did it with a Hawaiian theme both inside and out. With a Surf City blue and white exterior, it would fit right in on an episode of the original "Hawaii Five-O." The surfing safari theme continues throughout the interior and matches perfectly the open-air feel you get while inside. All the windows were down on our drive and the fixed roof mounted to a roll bar seemed perfect for warding off the intense tropical sun, even though we were 3,020 miles from McGarrett’s jurisdiction.

The 3.6-liter is plenty powerful for the task of moving a concept car around a desert resort at a relatively slow pace. In other Chrysler/Jeep applications, it makes from 283 to 305 hp and from 260 to 268 lb-ft of torque. In this case, the six-speed manual comes with a Tiki god for a shift knob. There were a few concept-car quirks that we could easily forgive if they announced they were going to build this: That shifter was a little wobbly and the wood-slat headliner rattled, but man, once that hula girl on the dash started swaying we didn’t want any other Jeep. This is easily doable, we say -- it’s no DOT-impossible Mighty FC. Come on Jeep, make it a limited run!

Being based on a JK Wrangler Unlimited, the Red Rock Responder is off-road-ready.

This is what Jeep calls the ultimate rescue vehicle (no doubt for pulling Fords and Chevies out of tight spots). A 4-inch lift kit with Fox shocks raises the body above the concept beadlock wheels for a look that says, “I’m from Jeep, I’m here to help.”

A 4-inch JPP lift on top of 37-inch BFG KM2s helps you get anywhere the triple R is needed. We went around on a little paved loop, but we noticed a few things. The cat-back exhaust kit on this thing was by far the most irritating sound we heard in a week of wilderness adventuring –- it would have you tearing it out with a claw hammer after 15 minutes on the trail. The engine and transmission didn’t feel completely set into place on this, but it’s a concept so we can’t complain. The compartments that are supposed to hold enough tools to raise the Titanic are pretty shallow and hold instead a minimum of gear: Hi-Lift jack, sockets and an air compressor. But the idea of a Super Wrangler Unlimited as a rescue vehicle is a sound one, and we like it.

The roof rack on the Renegade Desert Hawk is also a concept but one we're pretty sure they'll offer soon.

This thing is so cute you don’t know whether to drive it or give it a hug. We drove it. Not very much was changed on this so it drove practically stock, which is still nice. We’d have liked to try it out off-road a little just to see how Trail Rated it really is, but not on this trip. As it was, the mountain bike-ready MOPAR roof rack and the ultra-cool MOPAR accessory topo map hood decal are worth the price of admission.

True story: In Germany back in the 1980s, we were in an Abrams M1A1 tank that managed to get stuck pretty solidly in a frozen pond in Grafenwoehr and required a D88 for retrieval. The thing that carried our freezing and soaked carcass back to civilization? A Jeep.

The Staff Car is a salute (get it?) to Jeep’s military heritage. Based on a JK2A Wrangler, the Staff Car featured the most well-sorted powertrain of any of the wilder concepts we drove. The six-speed manual trans and clutch were easy to operate, and the engine was fully compliant. Steel wheels are wrapped in mil-spec Jeep tires just like the original Jeeps, while doors are removed “combat style” and the paint job is so bland it’ll make you desert (the color was matched from a piece of cardboard in Jeep’s design office). Those doorless openings on both sides were enough to make you long for DOT compliance, but that would make The Staff Car into just another rolling commuter. As it is, all that’s missing from this fully functional concept is a 50-cal perched on a swivel a la "The Rat Patrol."

Ladder can be pulled up at night to keep coyotes at bay.

There’s a whole subculture out there of people who put these semi-fixed fold-out tent structures on the roofs of their SUVs. Maybe you’ve seen them out in the Mojave or the Kalahari. The Grand Cherokee Overlander is just such an explorer. Sitting on a largely unchanged Grand Cherokee with 3.0-liter diesel V6 power, the tent structure was easy to pop open, climb into and get horizontal. A rig like this has the added advantage of getting your outdoors-hating spouse outdoors, where he/she can camp roughly six and a half feet above “… all those icky bugs and snakes.”

Since Jeep still refuses to build the Mighty FC (no doubt based on fears of being sued by just about everybody) we’d say the least it could do was make us a Chief. Come on, man, it’ll even be profitable (we think).

Can’t wait to see what concepts debut at next year’s Easter Jeep Safari, the 50th anniversary of that storied gathering.

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