It’s not just you who thinks this little car makes you wonder what decade you were born in. A car with a manual transmission that was mostly made to save gas but can still be fun to drive hard? Need more power and even less speed? The little bits that are often wrongly called “penalty boxes” but can often serve up a huge side dish of fun (sometimes accidentally) sound like the parts of a 1980s hatchback. However, a closer look shows that it is a mix! Besides that, it’s brand new. This is the latest Suzuki Swift Hybrid that will be sold in Europe. Of course, you can’t have one.
Last but not least, Suzuki no longer sells cars in this area. In that case, we’d all have Jimnys. In this similar situation, we could try a Swift that works really well. The Swift that came before it, which wasn’t a mix, had a real recipe for cheap, fun entertainment. It was designed to be sporty and was very light.
The Swift Hybrid is light, even though it’s not very fast. Suzuki says that the bantam weighs 2,092 pounds when it is fully loaded. It gets 64.2 mpg on the European test cycle, which is very good. This is due to its 1.2-liter inline-three engine, which only makes 81 hp and 83 lb-ft of torque. It would get about 20% less on the EPA test run, but it would still be a great 56 mpg. A 12-volt system with a starter-generator unit and a ten aH battery make up the mild hybrid hardware. It has 44 lb-ft of power. Suzuki says the gear only adds 15 pounds to the car, but it needs to be clarified how much this makes the Swift Hybrid more fuel-efficient overall.
Tokyo was the first place to see the fourth-generation Swift. It’s a whole new kind of small car, with sharp headlights, a big grille, and a simple design that stays true to the budget hatch formula that’s been used for decades. In general, it looks pretty good, and the upcoming better updates that have piqued our (albeit remote) interest in the little Swift should be able to learn from it. It’s a lot better than the generally awful small cars that were sold in our country decades ago, such as the Swift, Chevrolet Metro, and then Geo Metro.
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