I regret purchasing my Jeep Renegade. I made 4 mistakes:
1. I bought a first-year model. I justified this as okay because Fiat had already been making the 500x for a couple of years & all Jeep did was slap their body & tranny on it, so it wasn't really a new-new design.
2. I bought an FCA product (Fiat owns Jeep, Dodge, etc.). I swore to never buy a Dodge product again (we had 3 growing up - truck, minivan, etc., endless problems) because of the quality control issues. I didn't lump them in the same category as different branches of the same company. Oops.
3. Jeep's 9-speed transmissions have a long history of horribleness. One of my co-workers has already been through 3 replacement transmissions on his Grand Cherokee. You don't even have to google for negativity to find the problems, just do a search for "jeep 9-speed transmission" & it's pages upon pages of complaints. Also, I hate the 9-speed automatic in general; it's sluggish & makes awful use of the available power. The car performs much better in manual mode (Geartronic or Shiftronic or whatever), but there's a terrible 1-2 second shift lag that makes you feel like you're playing a driving game online with a dial-up connection, so I don't use it.
4. I didn't listen to literally every Jeep owner I know IRL (not to mention the ones in the Garage sub-forum here) tell me not to buy one & that they're problem-prone, not just with the quality control & reliability & transmission issues, but also with the electrical & electronic stuff.
I didn't listen to the word on the street; I rolled the dice & I got a lemon. I fought it for a year with FCA & the state & got nowhere. Approaching 3 months total in the shop out of 14 months of ownership. I know several people who have Renegades & don't have any problems (same with friends who own the GC's...some do, some don't), but mine is a complete pile of garbage; my list of issues is 2 pages long at this point. It felt like I was at the dealership service center every week last year. It ate up my vacation days & caused me a lot of undue stress from the issues. I worked with Jeep's highest level of support & they flat-out verbally stated that they refused to replace it or refund me & would continue sending me in for "free" warranty service (minus my time, my gas, etc.) until the warranty ran out. Unfortunately, it's also very expensive to get out of thanks to depreciation (one of the dangers & downsides of buying a car new), so I'm just biding my time until it's more economically feasible to offload later this year.
I was in a situation where I needed a car right away due to my previous leasing situation (was over-mileage by a long shot), wanted something with AWD because I live in a hilly area that has heavy winters, particularly an affordable AWD on the scale of availability, and the Jeep had a masculine appeal to it. I basically let my excitement drive the purchase, despite multiple red flags. I'm not so much upset with the car, as I realize every mass-produced products has duds, as much as I am at Jeep's poor handling of it. They've lost a customer for life; not that it matters much to them because of how big they are (and I'm sure ALL car companies are like this, maybe short of Tesla haha), but they're too big to care about taking proper care of individual owners, which is sad. I should have just sprung for another Forester
Other than that, I'm with Murloc. I typically over-research things & go the /r/BuyItForLife route because I've gone down the cheap & easy route too many times in the past. There's a saying that goes something like "buy cheap twice or buy quality once." I try to save up for decent stuff now, even if it means waiting (a lot) longer; one of my personal financial rules is that debt by choice is only acceptable for a reasonable house, reasonable car, and reasonable education - anything else needs to be bought in cash after bills are taken care of, not on credit. It means having to have patience, but also not being chained down by unnecessary debt, as well as having stuff that will hopefully not break on you too soon because you invested in decent-quality stuff.