Deserves To Be Popular
by Mike Grundon (16 Mar 06)

"Careful though, we wouldn't want to get stuck." I thought she was being a bit over-cautious. Just five days previous I'd been drift-charging through the white howl of winter. "Stuck" had come in snow as deep as the Jeep's headlamps. Looking down at Suzuki's latest four-wheel drive, the SX4, then out at the farm track of damp clay and limestone chips, I was on the point of saying, "Don't be daft," when I remembered Suzuki's head of engineering telling me it had just 15mm more ground clearance than the two-wheel drive road-going hatchback version. Just over half an inch doesn't make for much of a mud-plugging bias.

We needn't have worried though. The little car, with its Suzuki-designed 4GRIP traction system, took the whole business in its stride, and if we'd had more spare time we might have forged deeper than a few hundred yards into the world of gentle green-laning. As it was we staged the car up for a few photographs then returned it to its more natural environment - the road.

SX4 stands for Sport Crossover Four-wheel drive. It's a new car for Suzuki, which has been working in collaboration with Fiat to produce the full range. The Japanese company did the majority of the design work, including the 105bhp 1.6-litre VVTi petrol engine, while the Italians contributed their popular 118bhp 1.9-litre DDiS turbo diesel and its associated drivetrain as an option. And the end result is a lovely, lively little car that's likely to cost between £10,500 and £14,500.

It looks gorgeous, particularly in burnt orange with the full 4x4 trim known enigmatically as the Outdoor Line. The two-wheel-drive version can come with all the trim of the mud-monkey, but in standard Urban Line it does away with the bulky body protection and the roof-rails, preferring a roof spoiler at the back and some narrow rubbing strips down the flanks. For all the subtlety of the differences, it's much less visually outstanding than its bigger brother.

So what do you get for your money? Well, it's a five-door, five-seat hatchback built on a reinforced version of the chassis used on the Swift. Fuel economy and performance figures are pretty good. The two-wheel drive 1.6 with the five-speed gearbox will give you an official combined fuel consumption of 41.5mpg while offering you a 0-62mph time of 10.7 seconds.

The diesel engine, fed through a six-speed manual box, takes you to 62mph just 10.5 seconds after take off yet it'll cover 44.8mpg. The four-wheel drive models normally run in 2WD so they drop only around 2mpg on the road and take less than a second longer to reach 62mph.

More . . .

Suzuki Photo Gallery
Back to Suzuki Launch index
Back to main Launch index