Suzuki Jimny
REPORT 3
£ 18,499 OTR/£19,149 as tested/£252pcm
WHY IT’ S HERE
Can it possibly be as charming to live with as it is to look at?
DRIVER
Stephen Dobie
THUS FAR, I’VE NEVER OWNED A CAR THAT DOESN’T wear a sporty badge. I can’t honestly see myself ever buying anything that doesn’t at least have a semblance of performance to it. So spending six months with a car that’s doggedly unsporting is already proving to be fascinating.
Yep, that’s my polite way of grumbling about just how damn slow this thing is. The lack of speed itself isn’t ostensibly the issue; a 90mph maximum is, at the end of the day, 20mph above the UK’s limit. And with such little weight to shift, the wee Suzuki’s power and torque figures aren’t as cripplingly undernourished as they might first appear.
The problem with a top speed so modest is the din as the hard-worked 1.5-litre engine buzzes in the upper reaches of its rev range, even at legal speeds. The Jimny sits at around 3,500rpm on the motorway, which, when your engine’s as uncultured as this, does not a pretty noise make. It also leads to heroically bad fuel economy for a car so dinky, a problem no doubt exacerbated by an aerodynamic profile akin to a house brick’s.
So I’m shifting mindset. Rather than keeping noisily on the tail of traffic in the outside lane, I’m settling into a 60–65mph cruise in the inside lane. Mpg soars, the dB level plummets and my BPM settles to ‘lounging in the back of an S-Class’ levels. Seriously, the joy of going slowly is fertile ground us performance car geeks would do well to explore.
You’d be amazed by how little your ETA on Waze actually climbs, and, if you’ve a few podcasts racked up, a little more time on the road can be very well spent. Wave a hot hatch in front of my face and I’ll shamelessly leap down from the Jimny’s lofty driving position and resume a more frantic, frazzled approach to getting places, but being cajoled into a calmer way of life can’t hurt. Passing under smart motorway gantries without my stomach turning to jelly has proved especially pleasing.