The Jeep Wrangler and now its pickup truck counterpart, the Gladiator, are the envy of many competing automakers. The new Gladiator is already experiencing stellar sales as dealerships are marking up prices by tens of thousands of dollars. People apparently are willing to pay the premium. Meanwhile, the Wrangler and Wrangler Unlimited are sold about as fast as they're driven off the Toledo, Ohio assembly line. America loves Jeeps, enough said, and General Motors and Ford have definitely noticed.

The latter will soon launch the reborn Bronco SUV and just last month we learned GM was caught benchmarking a Wrangler Unlimited at its own Michigan proving grounds. Why would it benchmark a vehicle it had no intention of competing against?

According to Car and Driver, GMC will likely be the assigned brand for this new SUV and it could arrive as soon as 2022. As we also previously reported, in all likelihood the new SUV, possibly called the Jimmy, will ride on the same platform as the Chevy Colorado and GMC Canyon mid-size pickup trucks, both of which will reportedly receive a major update for 2021.

That means the reborn GMC Jimmy will have a proper body-on-frame chassis with serious off-road capabilities. Under the hood, there's a strong likelihood GM will stick with the Colorado/Canyon's 3.6-liter V6. Will the turbo diesel also be available? We certainly hope so.

Another reason why GMC will be given this SUV and not Chevy (at least not initially) is because it presents another opportunity to expand the AT4 off-road nameplate. GMC plans to have an AT4 version for all of its models in the near future. But will GMC make the Jimmy AT4 an SUV version of the Colorado ZR2? That would obviously be fantastic and given the rise in popularity of off-road SUVs once again, it would make complete sense to make this happen.