Suzuki Swace
1.8 Hybrid SZ5 CVT
Mileage 2490 List price £29,299 Target Price £28,941 Price as tested £29,899
Test economy 63.0mpg
WHAT BETTER TEST of a family estate car than a trip to Ikea with the family? This is a torture I try to inflict on most of the more practicality-minded cars I run.
The trip to get there is bad enough, encompassing about 16 miles of south London’s most traffic-laden and, to be frank, blandest suburban roads. Here, my Suzuki Swace did rather well, because it seems to be at its best around town. Its interior is large enough for four and comfortable in its seating, while the low-speed ride is really good.
When not being pressed into urgent action, its engine is hushed. Visibility, too, is good – not that there’s much of interest to see on such a journey.
According to the car’s digital readouts, it’s returning around 58mpg around town; that’s good going. Overall, I’m averaging 63mpg, which is even better going. That’s when you think what a comparable pure petrol or diesel-engined car might achieve, but I was left wondering if a plugin hybrid with a real-world electriconly range of, say, 25 miles, would have proved even more efficient on such a hop.
However, importantly, after we’d completed our shopping, we found the boot was large enough to swallow everything we’d bought. Well, nearly everything. One tall mirror wasn’t in the flatpack style of the rest of the items, so one rear seatback had to be folded down to accommodate it (the rear seats fold in a 60/40 pattern, so in other words, you can either fold one seat down and leave two up or two down and leave one up).
This done, the boot swallowed two large flatpack items and a couple of bags of smaller shopping alongside the mirror, and there was still room for four people inside, albeit with the two in the back having to sit right next to each other. For the recalcitrant teenager forced to sit close to her mother, this might actually have proved the most arduous part of the whole day.
All in, though, trip over, job done, test passed, I’d say.
‘What better test of a family estate than a trip to Ikea with the family?’