Suzuki Jimny

REPORT 5

£ 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?

DRI V ER

Stephen Dobie WE OUGHT TO BE IMMUNE TO PLOT TWISTS IN A WORLD OF POLITICAL unrest and our favourite TV characters being wantonly killed off. Yet the TG office shook to the news Suzuki Jimny order books have indefinitely closed. Come 2021, it’s set to leave Europe completely.

Suzuki itself isn’t surprised. The Jimny has a face that doesn’t fit an increasingly emissions-conscious world. But while this car is yet to fully win me over, we all ultimately root for the underdog. So I’ve been feverishly thinking of ways to keep it in UK showrooms.

Could it gain the modern 1.0-litre turbo from the Swift? That wouldn’t fit the needs of the Japanese market, says its maker, and that’s where most Jimnys end up. Could it lose its rear seats and morph into the van I treat mine as, to duck under a different set of regulations? Perhaps, and rumours have flown this could happen. But there’s no official word.

My favoured solution, though, would see UK rules bend to allow Japan’s kei-class Jimny over here. See, beyond GT-badged Porsches and French hatchbacks with roll cages, urban-centric kei cars are my big passion. Limited to 660cc and a footprint smaller than a Smart ForFour’s, they are heroically inventive. Gullwing sports cars, diddy fire engines, a tipper truck genuinely called the Autozam Mini Dump... there’s not a corner of the car world more diverse.

The kei Jimny loses the chunky bumpers and wheelarch extensions of the standard car and its 63bhp is little more than half the power of the 1.5-litre sold in Europe. And naturally Japan gets some superb special editions, with graphics and mudflaps helping it resemble anything from a Canary Islands hire car to a mock Mitsubishi Evo. With restrictive kei regs to illustrate just how undernourished it feels in day-to-day life, I think the Jimny would be an objectively more impressive car, too.