You know what I’ll never forget? Suzuki selling cars in America. Although the brand wasn’t quite able to make it work, it enjoyed cult classic highs like the legendary Grand Vitara, the respected Kizashi, and yes, the inimitable Swift. I can already feel myself growing old, picturing my aged future visage with unmanageable amount of nose hair telling my great-nieces and great-nephews of the days when a second Japanese S-brand sold cars to us. However, doing so will require telling them the whole truth.
See, the 2000s were an almost unfathomably weird time for Suzuki in America because although the crotch-rocket business was booming thanks to a near-endless supply of squids believing Gixxers would make great starter bikes, Suzuki’s car lineup was conflicted to say the least. Heck, a bunch of later Suzukis weren’t really Suzukis at all, but attempts to disguise other automakers’ cooking as authentic home-prepared cuisine.
The seeds for this were sown in 1981, when GM purchased a 5.3 percent stake in Suzuki. From there, GM began exporting the Suzuki Cultis under a variety of names including the Chevrolet Swift, and then in 1986, Suzuki and General Motors Canada went into business together by announcing the construction of the CAMI plant in Ingersoll, Ont., a joint venture facility still used by GM today. In 1998, GM upped its equity stake in Suzuki to 10 percent, and in 2002, GM bought the remains of Daewoo. This is where things start to get bizarre.
Deranged Daewoos
Here’s a fun fact: For a brief period of time, you could find more “Top Gear” Reasonably Priced Car, um, cars at an American Suzuki dealership than in any other brand’s showroom. That’s because in addition to the Aerio, which was sold in Europe as the Liana and used as Top Gear’s first reasonably priced car, it also sold Top Gear’s second reasonably priced car, the Chevrolet Lacetti. From 2004 until 2008, the Lacetti hatchback made it to America as the Suzuki Reno, while the sedan was sold as the Suzuki Forenza. It was an odd choice seeing as how the similarly priced Suzuki Aerio made more power, was available with all-wheel-drive, and seemed like a more interesting car overall, but that’s the way the cookie crumbled.
In 2005, Car And Driver tested the Reno and produced a photo containing some of the most sidewall roll I’ve seen in the past 20 years. The magazine didn’t seem to mind the Reno too much, giving modest praise to its equipment levels, design, and weirdly enough, its rear suspension. As per Car And Driver:
The so-called dual-link rear suspension (essentially, a strut with lateral and longitudinal locating links) is well behaved, curtailing unwanted yaw even when an overly ambitious corner entry results in all four tires letting go. Hey, we do this so you don’t have to.
Demerits reportedly included a vague shifter, an engine that didn’t have much beyond the midrange, and subpar steering, but considering the Reno didn’t have much of Suzuki’s own handiwork in it, this compact seemed at least competent. Strangely, Canada didn’t get the Lacetti as a Suzuki, but instead received the sedan, the hatchback, and a wagon as the Chevrolet Optra. Oh, and both Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands also got the Optra, albeit only as a sedan.
If selling two completely different cars in the same segment at the same time isn’t bonkers enough for you, might I interest you in a freaking inline-six slung sideways between the strut towers of a midsize sedan? This is the 2004 to 2006 Suzuki Verona, which was a Daewoo Magnus, which had a transversely-mounted 2.5-liter inline-six developed with expertise from Porsche, according to Wards Intelligence. Featuring 155 horsepower and 177 lb.-ft. of torque and hitched exclusively to a four-speed automatic, it was a bit shit, but it was interesting. Not interesting enough for Suzuki, which mis-listed it as a 2.4-liter engine in the official 2004 Verona spec sheet, but interesting to those of us who are easily amused. I’m one of them. Plus, this inline-six was smooth and came attached to a car absolutely loaded with equipment.
I’ve written a much deeper dive on the Suzuki Verona before if you’re interested in learning more about this oddity, but like the Reno and Forenza, Suzuki Canada didn’t find it suitable for passing off as homegrown. North of the border, it was sold as the Chevrolet Epica, which is also the name it was sold under in Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. I’m sensing a pattern here.
However, there was one Daewoo product good enough to be sold as a Suzuki in Canada, and that was the Swift+, also known to North Americans as the Chevrolet Aveo. Developed and originally sold as the Daewoo Kalos, it was a marked departure from the tiny little Swift of the ’90s and early 2000s, and while it wasn’t quite up to the grade of its predecessor, it was cheap and better than walking. Interestingly, it was also only sold as the Swift+ in Canada, never making it to the USA as a Suzuki.
Xtra Large 7-Seater
Remember how I mentioned the CAMI plant in Canada earlier? Well, in the mid-2000s, it was pivoting away from producing the Chevrolet Tracker and Suzuki Grand Vitara, and towards production of the Chevrolet Equinox and Pontiac Torrent. Thankfully, Suzuki also needed a new XL-7 around this time, a three-row SUV with a name standing for Xtra Large 7-seater. So how do you turn a first-generation Equinox into a three-row crossover? Well, you start by somehow shrinking the wheelbase by one tenth of an inch. Look, your guess is as a good as mine. Regardless, the second-generation XL-7 was 8.4 inches longer than a first-generation Equinox, and all of that length was outside of the wheelbase.
From there, an optional third row of seats was fitted, designers drew up some of the weirdest composite headlights ever offered in North America, and one of the most convoluted engine schemes in modern history was set into motion — Suzuki would build GM’s disastrous 3.6-liter V6 under licence in Japan, then ship these engines across the Pacific, have them transported across most of Canada, and then put them into Canadian-built crossover utility vehicles for North American consumption.
Unsurprisingly, the second-generation XL-7 didn’t seem particularly Suzuki. If you squinted really hard in the dark, the dashboard looked like it came from a W-body Impala, and so much was lifted from the GM parts bin that even the alloy wheels pictured in early brochure photos were from the Pontiac Torrent. It just didn’t seem all that appealing beyond offering fairly strong value in lower trims with seven seats, and the market quickly spoke.
From the start of 2009 through May 11, the CAMI plant in Ingersoll made four XL-7s. Not 4,000 or 400, four. In addition to a shift in demand, GM came out with its own line of three-row crossovers that were larger, better appointed, and more spacious than the XL-7 in 2006, meaning this whole endeavor of stretching an Equinox to make an XL-7 probably wasn’t the smartest use of resources. If it weren’t for the CAMI plant, you’d really wonder why Suzuki didn’t just rebadge a GMC Acadia. However, even though XL-7 production ended in 2009, it wasn’t the last car Suzuki rebadged.
Where In The World?
See, one year before the end of the second-generation XL-7’s life, Suzuki announced that it would be rebadging another automaker’s midsize pickup truck. It wasn’t a worked-over Chevrolet Colorado, it was a Nissan Frontier with a new front end and a new name: Suzuki Equator. While this seems a little out out pattern compared to previous work with GM, it makes perfect sense. Not only was the Equator a better culture fit for Suzuki, being a Japanese truck, it also seemed like a culture fit for Suzuki’s other customers. Forget cars for a second, the brand’s more known for motorcycles and powersports, and people with toys need something to haul those toys around.
At first, things seemed promising. The Equator won Peterson’s 4Wheel and Off-Road’s 2009 4×4 Of The Year award, you could get it with goodies like a locking rear differential, a brace of skid plates, it was a few hundred dollars cheaper than an equivalent Frontier, and it came with a longer warranty than Nissan offered. Sadly, it didn’t pick up many buyers. From 2009 through 2013, just 8,382 Equator pickup trucks found homes across America, and Canada pulled the plug on the project early after the 2010 model year.
What Does It Mean?
Looking back, a number of things conspired to push Suzuki out of the American and Canadian car markets. From a small dealer network to shifting consumer tastes in the 2000s towards large SUVs, things just weren’t moving in the brand’s favor overall.
Still, I can’t help but wonder if part of the issue with Suzuki in America was that towards the end, it didn’t sell enough proper Suzukis. The little SX4 with its available all-wheel-drive was great, the Kizashi is still respected by those in the know today, and the 2006 to 2013 (2014 in Canada) Grand Vitara was an excellent little SUV. There are good reasons we often forget about Suzuki’s badge-engineered models, mostly because they didn’t have a solid sense of identity. They seemed to be more of an effort of throwing stuff at the wall to see what would stick rather than true examples of what Suzuki could do.
Top graphic car images via Suzuki; emblem image via Ebay seller
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The XL7 also went racing at Pikes Peak!
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Suzuki_XL7_Hill_Climb_Special.jpg#/media/File:Suzuki_XL7_Hill_Climb_Special.jpg
The Kizashi lives rent free in my head, as C&D(?) drove a fleet of them from the factory in Japan, through rural Russia, through Alaska, and down to the HQ in CA. It was pretty epic at the time.
It’s the best-styled small sedan in the last 80 or 90 years.
A coworker had an SX4 she called “Big Red” because of how spacious it was inside. And yeah, I always loved the few Kizashis I ever saw on the road. I wish they’d had a chance to forge ahead with their own identity in the market.
> second Japanese S-brand
What’s the first? Soyota? Sonda?
Subaru?
Which is crazy, because Suzuki absolutely dwarfs Subaru.
As Torch reminded us yesterday.
Scion as well!
When I read “sideways”, I imagined an engine with the cylinders in a horizontal position. But no, you mean “the correct way”. You always want your rotating masses around an axis that is horizontal and perpendicular to the direction of travel (same orientation as the wheels), so traverse is the correct way to mount an engine, especially in a front-wheel-drive car.
Transverse is correct for a FWD, but FWD is wrong wheel drive, so longitudinal is better.
No, no, no. Transverse, mid-engine, RWD is the Holy Underoos of automotive engine layout. The Muira was, and still is, automotive perfection. And anyone who disparages this idea will have their funding cut by Elon’s 17 y.o. DOGE-bro.
Ok this is also an acceptable answer. I would also accept MR2 and Elise and many others as great justification for why transverse engines are the best.
It really is amazing how compact the whole Miura drivetrain is. Must be a bugger to work on but probably not too much worse than longitudinal mid-rear engines.
RWD is from a time when the technology did not exist to drive wheels that steer. We are past that now. FWD has ruled since the 1970s at least.
And yet RWD is still the most fun. Technologically obsolete or not, I still greatly prefer driving RWD.
Fun isn’t the idea when the roads get slick. For everyday use, FWD is far superior.
Besides, there’s no curvy roads around here anyway.
Ah! Looks like we found the CV joint salesman!!!
Can you elaborate on that?
I’m fine with transverse mounted inline engines, but transverse V-shaped engines tend to be difficult to work on when you’ve got one bank of cylinders facing the firewall. In some cases, you have to dismount the engine to do anything to the rear bank.
Rotating mass creates an inverse rotating torque momentum on the car.
A car (as a ship) can roll, pitch and yaw. A longitudinal engine will try to make the car roll. You don’t want that as it tries to make the car go off course as the side that is pressed down has more grip then the side going up. Sure, the torque momentum isn’t all that big, but still, you don’t want it. An engine that is mounted vertically would make the car yaw. That would be even worse! A transversally mounted engine wants to make the car pitch. That’s not a big deal as the car will pitch with acceleration and braking anyway.
If you want a V engine mounted transversally, your best bet is a VR-type engine as VW used to build, but I agree that an inline engine is better suited.
But in this day and age, there is really no reason to have a V engine anymore.
Thank you for the explanation. How much does the roll from a longitudinal engine actually affect the handling or ride feel of the average passenger vehicle?
Not very much, or any old car with a big longitudinal engine would veer to one side when you floor it, or at the very least roll visibly. I don’t know if anyone has bothered to measure it. But if you watch videos with cars with such engines being driven hard with the bonnet (hood) off, you can see the engine lurch on hard acceleration, the direction being dependent on which way the engine turns.
Suzuki’s practice of badge engineering is alive as well. Want a RAV4 but slightly weirder? Get the Suzuki A-Cross!
What’s amazing is every one of those interior dashboards is better than almost anything on the market today.
Screens have ruined interior design.
I got a Verona once as a rental. By my recollection, it must have been ’09 or so. It was a decent enough rental car, but, well, it was a Daewoo.
I remember my neighbor bringing home a brand new blue Forenza more than two decades ago. So proud he was of the car, and how quickly he beat the thing into a pile of crap.
I parked next to an Equator a few weeks ago. I was honestly shocked to see the Suzuki face in my mirror as it pulled in next to me a few seconds after I had parked, as I had almost completely forgotten they existed.
I Loved my SX4. First new car I bought as a broke Airman. Tech package with the 5 speed. Had such a fun time driving that thing on fire roads in the Florida panhandle. Had an old tentcot modified to be an early roof top tent, a RROR lift with some chunky tires (can’t remember the size), and a spliced in connector using PC parts and a resistor to get a line in using a 30 pin dock. Loved that thing!
Fun read. Seems Suzuki’s marketing and strategy teams were a deck of tarot cards and a Magic Eight Ball.
If you want Suzuki rebadging in another direction entirely, the second generation Suzuki Cultus/Swift [aka, Geo Metro] was sold in europe as a Subaru Justy…
Subaru Justy and its iterations is an interesting case itself.
First two generations were based on Suzuki Cultus/Swift, third one was a rebadged Suzuki Ignis and forth – the last one offered in Europe – was a rebadged Daihatsu Sirion.
Currently the Justy name is alive only in Japan and – you guessed it – is a rebadged version of other car; Daihatsu Thor to be precise.
One correction I believe, the first generation Justy that Japan and the US got was a real Subaru, based on the Subaru Rex Kei car, was available in the US until 1994. One of my college roomates had one of those with a stick and 4WD. Would have been fun to scamper up a (reasonably maintained) mountain road in one of those! For trivia I think it was the first car sold in the US with a CVT and the last passenger car (not truck) sold in the US with a carburetor.
I had a friend who went through the big D and ended up pretty broke. He leased one of those Justys. His ex wife was a smart, attractive nice person, so we felt sorry for him losing her, but when we realized he commuted over 2 hours each way on the highway every day in that Justy, the real pity kicked in. If I recall, the last gen air cooled VW Beetles had more power than that thing.
College buddy had one, we’d joke it was a 1/2/3/4/5.
1 Carb
2 Seats (rear seat deleted by previous owner to build a sub enclosure ???? Why)
3 Cylinders
4 Wheel Drive
5 Gears
On snow tires it did better than most trucks off road, and was an absolute riot in winter except for freezing to death. We even got it up to 74mph going downhill behind a semi!
Suzuki’s demise in America bums me out. My SX4 was an awesome car that was shockingly well put together. It was a real gem. I can’t think of anything that punches above it’s price quite like it did, but then again we’re not exactly swimming in bargain options these days.
The Kizashi was also genuinely nice, right-sized and well priced. GM foisting garbage onto the brand for so long killed the reputation of the brand and made luring anyone into a showroom basically impossible.
Yeah right, the REAL Suzukis were pretty awesome.
It’s like a re-do of Asüna and Passport Automobiles in Canada in the 1980s!
Weirdness continues: Chevrolet also sold these rebadged Daewoos as Chevrolets in Canada…at the same time this was happening.
Chevrolet Optra! Not instead of our vaunted Chevy ‘Bu, but in addition to it!
I hate how foreign automakers try to make weird mashups of what they think americans want rather than be the different car company they are oversees.
To be fair, Toyota and Honda have been successful beyond imagination with that philosophy (and to a degree, Nissan), so it’s not hard to see why other Japanese marques would try the same formula. Subaru and VW sales have skyrocketed since introducing America-only models, and Mitsubishi’s lack of them is basically why they’re floundering.
This Suzuki-Daewoo nonsense was mostly GM’s fault anyway, Suzuki basically lets its local operations run themselves more or less autonomously as seen with Maruti and Magyar.
I don’t have the numbers, but somehow my instinct tells me VW sold more Golfs before discontinuing them here than they ever sold Americanized Passats, at least by what I see on the road. Arguably they probably made better margin on the Passats as they were built to a price. On the other hand, they seem to be moving lots of Atlas, which is likely built to a price too. No shame in them making money, but I’m not sure it benefits their customers all that much and it will likely dilute their brand in the long term.
Here to say that my 2006 Aerio Wagon did 5 years living in downtown Chicago, and clocked almost 250K before the wheels fell off. All i ever needed to do to it was oil changes, brakes, and a new set of struts.. thats it in 5 years. I have never owned a car with a lower cost of operation… and i had plenty of 80’s GM stuff.
The AWD was solid, it was quick enough to not be a traffic hazard, held 4 people and was great on fuel.
I loved that lil car.
It would help if the photo captions gave the model names, and not just the photo credit. Not really familiar with the Suzuki lineup.
GM ruined Suzuki because they got jealous. Oh well, now that GM kicked them out of the US, Suzuki is the most profitable car company (mostly thanks to India, where GM also pulled out of).
From the awesome cute lil Swift to the small SUV things they’re also famous for (and the small crossover segment is particularly hot now!), Suzuki makes the exact kind of cars we need now. They were WAY ahead of their time!
I agree that the real Suzukis are awesome, and they degraded themselves by rebadging shitty Daewoos. GTFAC with that Aveo (also called Pontiac Wave, later G3)
Toyota and Honda are starting to rebadge inferior shit too. Honda’s Prologue and Toyota’s BMW (and the Mazda rust bucket they had before) 🙁
In Europe, the SX4 was rebadged as a Fiat! The Fiat Sedici might be the best Fiat ever made 😛
Apparently the SX4 was a joint Suzuki/Fiat development from the start, with styling by Giugiaro. The SX4 is still manufactured, I wish we got them in the States!
I have to disagree with everything I read here. I skipped some spots so maybe some correct. But during the blah low performance high regulations GM was like Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Not bad but certainly not great. Could have a better team if he didn’t insist on a 20 year old platform that no longer worked. And was totally against changing or having anyone on the team that was smarter than him. So to get small cars entered into agreement with not only Suzuki and Daewoo but also Isuzu. Started nice until it was apparent GM was the idiots of the group so buy control and actually make decisions that ruin the Asian team and still not use the knowledge bought to do better.
I watched Suzuki closely through it’s tenure in North America. I had a Swift GTi (still have it), and was hoping to replace it with the new equivalent one day.
In 2004, the new Swift Sport was slated to be sold in North America according to local dealers. Unfortunately, as legend has it, the bean counters couldn’t justify the costs of homologation for the North American market, so the plan was axed at the last minute.
Instead, we got a bunch of badge engineered Dawoos to fill out the line up.
That Swift Sport was very well recieved, with Tiff Needel claiming it was as fun to drive as a 911.
It was a fine example of what Suzuki did best (little fun cars), and if it had been sold here I think it would have changed Suzuki’s future.
Friends of mine had a swift gti back in the 90s. We called it the pod. That thing was awesome!
Where I live there used to be a Suzuki dealership. There were Equators all over the city because the Nissan dealership were being all sorts of off with their prices thanks to the Great Recession. I’m pretty sure we were responsible for like a quarter of all Equators sold judging by how many there were. Within about six years they were all gone because without the dealership there was no service bay, and the Nissan dealership refused to service them. In direct proportion to how many Equators were disappearing was the number of Frontiers increasing though.
The same thing seems to have happened with the SX4 and the Scion iA/Mazda2/Toyota Yaris. As the SX4s disappeared from 2015 to 2017 Scion iAs appeared in proportional numbers, repeating with the Toyota Yaris and Mazda2 from 2017 to 2020 once Scion got kachunked. These aren’t sales that are going to other types of vehicles, they’re sales that have stayed within the sub-compact hatchback segment.
The Suzuki Verona also wasn’t actually all that bad. It’s just because they were sold so cheaply (I remember seeing new examples on the lot for $14,000) people who weren’t in the best circumstances tended to buy them. Within about two years they’d be missing various lights and have parts of the bumpers cracked or twisted.
Disagree on the SX4 being “great”. I owned one for 2 years and it was adequate transportation and the selectable and lockable AWD was a neat trick but it got crap gas mileage at anything over 55 mph.
Seriously, my 4Runner gets better gas mileage on the highway than it did. Couple the 20mpg highway with a 10 (maybe 12) gallon tank and you spend an annoyingly high percentage of time at the pump.
Having lived in Erie, PA, for a couple of years before the pandemic, I’ve seen more examples of all of these cars than I’d like to admit. They are probably being replaced with Nissans as time goes on.
“ a second Japanese S-brand”
Scion?
Subaru (Took me a second, as well)
Ha, and I’ve had 2! As a kid I always thought they were Australian, thanks to Paul Hogan.
I was halfway through the article before it came to me.
Wasn’t Scion just an America brand (for boomers)? Pretty sure everywhere else the models were badged as Toyotas…
It was a US and Canada brand for millennials! From when millennials were young and expected to have more purchasing power than boomers! The great recession put an end to that notion, along with Scion.
Suzukis are still sold where I live and their perception is quickly changing from super reliable and dependable cars to a bunch of crap from China and India.
All the good cars like the Vitara, the SX4, the Kizashi, the Swift are gone and instead we’re getting rebadged and third-world market cars that fail crash tests, get discontinued every couple of years and suffer from terrible reliability.
Look at this absolute disgrace of a car: https://www.globalsuzuki.com/automobile/lineup/s-presso/img/ex_img01.jpg
The only saving grace keeping Suzuki afloat right now is the Jimny.
No sir we are reading here that China only makes the very best cars and they are sold for less than any other car and it is only Trump and MAGA that keeps us from enjoying cars that are perfect will never break down get 100 mpg and are not stealing all of our personal data and are not built by slave labor. I insist you take back your slander of Chinese quality even though I have seen crap Chinese build for 50 years.
I have been convinced. I will go right now and buy all the cars I can from the glorious Asian empire so I support further advancement of their quality and technology, impeccable copyright integrity and stellar parts and support network.
I will being my journey with a BAIC SUV that is in NO WAY a Jeep knockoff: https://ksa.motory.com/tinymce/out_6076139f7ed041618351007.jpg