Suzuki Jimny review

By topgear, 19 September 2018

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Overview
What is it?
It’s the all-new Suzuki Jimny, or ‘Jimmy’ as every smartphone and laptop auto-correct feature insists on calling it. Good luck Googling one of these if you decide you want one.

‘Want one’ tends to happen about three seconds after clapping eyes on the Jimny. Cuter than a Jeep Renegade and as sturdy looking as the Mercedes G-Class (but at six-tenths the scale), it’s one of those instantly desirable pieces of design, like a Fiat 500 or whatever Apple’s attached a lower-case ‘i’ to this week.

(Regular Jimny too boring? Click HERE to read about Liberty Walk's vision of the car!)

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Jimnys have extremely loyal buyers, but for every one potentially warded off by the new model going ‘fashion’, I’d wager it’s already won five new fans via social media who’s never have had it on their radar before.

(Click HERE to read about the Jimny with a Cullinan)

The old Jimny lasted an astonishing 20 years on sale. In those two decades, three things boomed in popularity: SUVs, downsizing, and retro. So the new Jimny, complete with its 1.5-litre petrol engine and functionally honest design, looks like a masterstroke.

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Underneath, the Jimny is still based around a traditional steel, ladder frame chassis, but it’s a new, stiffer foundation for 2018, supporting rigid front and rear axles with separate differentials, and a four-cylinder petrol engine with 100bhp and 128Nm, and 200cc more capacity than its predecessor.

There is no turbo, no hybrid assistance, and no diesel. Suzuki hasn’t yet confirmed how quickly the 1.5-litre motor can tow 1,135kg of Jimny from 0-100km/h, but if it’s under 12secs, we’d be impressed, and buy the brave-shifting test driver a pint.

That boxy phizzog will eventually stop bullying the air at 145km/h, but of far more relevance are claims of 6.6l/100km and 178g/km on the WLTP eco cycle.

Very modest numbers for a small, lightweight simpleton in 2018, aren’t they? Efficiency perhaps isn’t the Jimny’s strong suit, but as we’ll see, it can be more frugal than the lab tests suggest.

As standard, you get a manual gearbox with five speeds, and a low-range transfer box for 4x4 scrambling. You can spec a four-speed auto, but it’s even more sluggish than the manual and fewer than ten per cent of Jimny-folk will bother. Good.

(Click HERE to read about another of Suzuki's cute kei-cars, the Cappuccino)

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See, the Jimny is supposed to be for the professional outdoors-type. The ones who spend their days in Gore-Tex, zips and double-laced boots hats, and only ever sip tea out of flasks. This isn’t some sort of pound-shop G-Wagen to pose on campus or outside pilates class. It’s a tool.

This new Jimny is 30mm shorter, 45mm wider and 20mm taller than before, to best balance off-road articulation and cabin space. It’s got a bigger boot, a wipe-down interior and hill-descent control.

As standard you get delightfully utilitarian steel wheels, and there’s no option to paint those anti-scratch plastic bumpers and wheel arch spats body-colour. If that offends you, there are a hundred faceless crossover clones that will complement your life far less intrusively than the Suzuki. You know where to find them. Even Suzuki makes a couple.

But, if you’re the sort of person who appreciates a flat-roofed vehicle because it’s easier to clear snow off and mount cargo racks to, or you favour cars with a roofing gutter so you’re not dripped on as you load the tailgate, then you might like the Jimny. You might like it a lot. You’ll be in good company, because despite its on-road haphazardness and packaging compromises, Top Gear likes it a lot too.

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Driving
What is it like on the road?
Some cars belie their size, mass or stance and drive nothing like how you’d expect them to upon first glance. The Suzuki Jimny, I promise you, is not one of those cars. What it is, is a 1.7-metre tall telephone box with only two-and-a-quarter metres between its wheels.

Wheels shod in chunky Firestone all-season tyres, connected to recirculating ball steering geared to not relieve their driver of their thumbs on an undulating track, rather than the sort of racecar-like precision and delicate accuracy you’d get in, ooh, I dunno, a Dacia Duster.

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Yep, you need to acclimatise to the Jimny’s (mis)behaviour. The steering is arm-twirlingly slow and vague in the extreme, but this is fine. The car is small and doesn’t weigh much over 1.1 tonnes even in fully optioned form, so steering loads are never unduly lofty and it’s unlikely you’ll be leaning hard on the front end, testing its reserves of grip.

You’ve no need to, because Top Gear has boldly gone to discover what happens when you do, and the result is comical body roll, but not the premature surrender into safety understeer you might fear.

There’s actually a load more front-end grip to cling on for than you’d expect, but you’ll be pushing through piercing tyre squeal and a paralytic sway to find it. Best take it easier.

The engine should help with that approach. This is a slow car. It doesn’t get off the line quickly, it doesn’t punch through the gears swiftly, and above 110km/h, acceleration is by appointment only.

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But, again, there are some pleasant surprises to be had once you’ve accepted this is not, say, a Skoda Karoq. First off, Suzuki’s done a good job of subtly curving the flat-looking windscreen so wind noise isn’t a disaster. The boxy mirrors create more bluster. And the gearshift is light and mechanically pleasant.

Oh, the change is lengthy – you’ll be handing over to a passenger halfway between third and second to let them take over the task – but the action itself is neat and satisfying. Just as well, as the gearing is short: 110km/h equals 3,600rpm in fifth gear, and there are only five forward speeds.

The 1.5-litre engine revs gruffly and gets into a shouting match with the transmission whine as the revs build. On the road, the Jimny’s happiest in two-wheel-drive mode, but you can drop the lever and engage all four tyres at up to 100km/h.

The low-range gearbox will haul you over rutted tracks and up 38-degree slopes effortlessly if you go puddle-hopping. Our off-road test time was limited to a course so tame a Swift Sport could’ve completed it with its handbrake on, but the Jimny’s unflustered ‘give me a real challenge’ enthusiasm showed big potential.

The traction control disengages with a single button prod, not a complex hold-then-count-to-forty-seven riddle, the hill-hold and descent modes did the trick, and it’s easy to spot on the trail too, because it’s boxier than an 8-bit Rubik’s cute and the visibility is excellent.

Just watch out for that overhanging spare wheel out back – there’s no parking sensors or reversing camera to stop you scuffing your wheel before it’s ever been mounted to an axle…

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It’d tricky to be definitive on the car’s ride yet, because it’s only been sampled in Germany, where the roads are paved with silk. Where there were rough patches, the Jimny isolated the bumps skilfully without using its structure as a giant tuning fork.

Body control is sloppy though; with the aftershock of a roundabout exit still wibbling about the suspension a second or two after you’ve made good your escape. Happily, it stops neatly enough when commanded.

On the inside
Layout, finish and space 
The Jimny’s theme of majoring on no-nonsense utilitarian hardiness with just a smattering of twee touches continues inside. You eye simple dials and a monochrome multi-function computer, but the clock faces are mounted in cool oblong pods with exposed bolt heads. Normally that’d constitute shoddy workmanship, but Suzuki’s made them an industrial feature.

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So, we don’t mind that the dash is a cliff face of hard plastic. It feels solid, not brittle, and you could hang something a lot heavier than the Saturday takeaway from the passenger-side Jesus handle.

The touchscreen media set-up in SZ5 models is from the Swift and Vitara. So are the climate control knobs. You could get away without having either, in an SZ4, but they’re congruously integrated, for what it’s worth.

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You might find you’re short of stowage you front. The (undamped) glovebox is bijou, the door pockets are practically 2D and would be filled by a postcard, there are two small cupholders between the seats, and no sunglasses cubby in the roof. Nothing’s been allowed to eat into passenger space, which rather depends on what you’ve done with the windows.

Glass raised, there’s a shortage of elbow room – not as severe as in an old Landie Defender, but pinched all the same. Drop the windows via their centrally mounted switches and with an elbow perched atop the windowsill, motoring has rarely felt more cheerful.

The manually adjustable seats are comfortable, but lack ultimate off-road support, and face a steering wheel which only adjusts for rake, not reach. This six-foot driver felt comfortable enough given time to acclimatise, but if I’d hopped straight in from a Jeep Renegade or Mazda CX-3 (as you can tell, picking a dead-on Jimny rival is tricky), then the Suzuki would’ve felt archaically awkward. Some reach adjustment at facelift time please, Suzuki.

The Jimny can seat four adults. It can also offer 377 litres of luggage space. But it cannot do these things at the same time. In fact, with the rear seat backs raised, the boot would struggle to swallow a MacBook Air.

Swing the gas strut-assisted, hinged tailgate open (hinged from the right so it’s pavement-ready for the UK, Australia and Japan, but not for left-hand-drive markets) and you find that, beyond the 382mm wider loading bay, the backrests butt right up to the back window.

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The two rear seats are pinched to the middle of the cabin for greater legroom and a superior view forward, and they are incredibly roomy, with enough headroom for proper adults and much more elbow room to be smug about. You can also fold the front seats near-flat and have them join the rear seat squabs as a makeshift bed. Happy camping.

Tug a simple fabric loop and they spring flat into the floor, revealing their plastic chequer plate loading surface that ought to be easy to wipe clean. That’s your lot, gimmick-wise. There’s not going to be a five-door, or a long-wheelbase. Basically, it’s a 2+2 city car, or a covered pick-up truck.

Owning
Running costs and reliability
Before you own a car, one ought to buy it, strictly. It’s frowned upon by the police not to. But we can’t tell you what the Jimny will cost to buy yet, because Suzuki is still in the process of working out the predicted residual values and setting its payment plans.

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We’re told it will cost more than the outgoing model, but beyond that, we’re waiting for an official announcement in November 2018 and the official start of sales in 2019.

At the time of writing – mid-September 2018 – Suzuki has scored over 3,000 expressions of British interest online for the new Jimny, which is over double the number it’s sold annually in the UK in the past decade. Fingers crossed that charming design is pulling the punters in, because we want this thing to succeed. Look at that face, how could you not?

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In the UK, there’ll be a standard SZ4 grade and a top-spec SZ5. You’re looking at pictures of the latter, which is all we’ve driven so far. It gets 15-inch alloys, LED headlights, automatic climate control, touchscreen digi-radio/nav with Android and Apple smartphone mirroring and heated front seats. Suzuki says it expects SZ5 to swallow 70 per cent of sales.

We’d be tempted by the SZ4, and here’s why. It rolls on 15-inch steel rims painted black, which look ace. You still get air-con, cruise control, DAB radio, Bluetooth and fog lights thrown in. Oh, plus there’s auto headlights with high-beam assistant, Suzuki’s usual (massively over-active) lane keep assistant, and six airbags. That’s a hill of equipment.

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So, what you earn with SZ5 is dubious. Chunky heater control knobs are less pretentious than auto climate control. The touchscreen is, honestly, rubbish, with a cheap Fisher-Price interface, laggy sat nav and fiddly menus. It spoils Suzuki’s Swift, ain’t great in the Vitara and it’s no more welcome here.

I mentioned earlier Suzuki only claims 15.2km/l, but our test route covered German autobahns (really, the things we do in the line of duty), sweeping A-roads and a dollop of urban looping, and we saw an estimated 17.8km/l, while relentlessly flogging the air-con on a sweltering day.

Driven carefully, the Jimny is easily a 19.2km/l everyday proposition, which is just as well given it’s only got a 40-litre tank. Pity it doesn’t have a sixth gear. It’d save on fuel as well as tinnitus.

Verdict
Final thoughts and pick of the range
The new Suzuki Jimny is a car of as many surprises as it is predictability. No, it’s not a sophisticated crossover dressed up in waders, but its authenticity as an off-roader hasn’t unduly compromised it on the road.

Certainly, it’s got more rarefied manners than any Jimny before now, and its hard-fought momentum and deliberate controls make it rollicking good fun to tack along in.

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Hopefully, Suzuki can get the pricing right. Hopefully, an audience will be drawn in by the tractor-beam of its squee-factor styling. Hopefully, they’ll come for the oddity and not be dismayed by the Jimny’s hardy reality and brutalist cabin.

In the end, you just can’t separate the sheer joy of the way this rascal looks, and the adorable character it plays as it skips along, from the way it drives, and that irrepressible cute-meets-tough joy is what will make it ultimately a little cracker to live with.

It’s not the most complete 4x4 you can buy, but it’s a plucky underdog. Not to mention, something of a new Top Gear hero.

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