Renegade II - Carpeting!?

I'm continuing to assess our new cj5. Was carpeting standard, optional, or is it aftermarket.
The carpet is tailored for the cj5, is installed under the roll bar base, shift bezels, seats and seat belts.

 

Aftermarket, and carpet in a CJ is just asking for rust....

 

Why would you have carpet in a off road vehicle? Why would you have it in any vehicle?

 

yep

 

At the Jeep dealer, we sold a lot of carpet kits. In SoCal, rust was not much of a concern, for most customers. They were often installed at the dealership with a new car delivery. The kits we had were charcoal indoor-outdoor with bound edges and snaps. The carpets could be snapped in and out for cleaning, removal of debris or whatever. "Jeep approved special equipment" - likely could be ordered with the Jeep, but they never were (and the factory was pretty sloppy at installing special equipment).

In my CJ-5 and first CJ-6, I installed the carpet kit. I added jute padding under the carpets for a soft barefoot feel, cool floors, and significantly less noise. Nice.

Not sure what's available today. Certainly a kit for the CJ-6 is not. I believe you can get kits for the CJ-5 that are molded to the floor profile, but these will lack the snap-in snap-out feature. Would not be difficult to duplicate the kit if you could sew heavy materials.

 

I'd check under to see what damage it may have caused. When I bought my Renegade II it had carpet that had been glued down. I ripped it out and found it was still wet underneath and had rusted out the floors. The jeep was stored in a shop before I bought it.

 

Not a speck of rust, not even in the basement under the passenger seat.

 

I just carpeted my CJ6 and cut padding as well to help keep the long highway trips quiet. Gonna pull it back out and get the edges bound but I love the noise reduction and how we cut it to go around everything and be easy to remove