I stay in 2wd for as long as I can...you'll want to be in 4hi as soon as you may need some additional traction and 4Lo BEFORE you enter an area where it looks dicey and will need to crawl ie rock gardens... if you try to pop it in at the moment you need it...you are probably too late.

wow....yall are totally different then me. I go back and forth from 4hi to 2hi all the time. I live in Fl so 90% of the trails are that muddy goopy stuff. i have a stick in my rubicon, so i use low 5-6th for mud...you want a high gear, not a low gear in mud...low gear just creates to much torque and you dont stay on top of the mud.

how does 4lo work if you have an auto? How does it pick what gear to put you in or is it a one gear show?

for the lowest gearing, shift your trasmission to the lowest setting and if you're looking for something a little less, shift back into the standard drive position.

In Drive it will run up and down the gears 1,2,D,2,1

in second it will go 1,2,1

in first it will stay in first, it's locked into that single gear.

so D with od off it will shift up and down thru all the gears (ex. od of course)
second it will only use 1&2 up and down
First is only first

well for me i locker into 4 lo when the mall parking lot gets a dusting or more of snow and when it is raining i locker into 4 high :rotflmao1::rotflmao1::rotflmao1::rotflmao2::rotfl mao2:

In 4-Lo the transmission will stay in the highest gear available until you downshift... At least that's the way it seemed to me in Moab. Every time I downshifted to 2nd, the RPMs would jump up and the engine would whine a little more. But it made the Jeep really creep, since you increase the crawl ratio when you select a lower transmission gear. I'm pretty sure the auto tranny defaults to 3rd when you engage 4-Lo with the transmission in Drive. I could be wrong though.

For what it's worth...

Transmission 42RLE -- Automatic, Four-Speed Overdrive

Gear Ratios
1st - 2.84
2nd - 1.57
3rd - 1.00
4th - .69
Reverse - 2.21

I still dont get why the jeep bogs down in sand? And it seems i can't drive a higher speed in 4lo, where in sand the speed is needed. in soft sand i was driving all the time in 4hi and in 2nd gear and the jeep sometimes started to loose power fast, shouldnt it keep spinning the wheels? Thats the thing i dont get. When i watch vids you see vehicles getting stuck but their wheels are still kicking in the dirt? mine doesn't do that, it just stalls down.

SO how fast can i go on the 5th and 6th? because on soft sand i need speed too, plus if i put the kill switch for the esp will it help or still it will kick in?

Yeah. I had to re-learn how to finess the Rubi. First gear in 4lo is not always needed... even on some steeper climbs.