Stop Suzuki if you've heard this one before

 

There's something just a tad familiar about one of the new concept cars Suzuki is showing off at this month's Tokyo Motor Show.

The X-Lander, which uses a 1.3 litre hybrid engine mated to the four-wheel-drive system of the company's venerable Jimny off-roader (which, incidentally, we can't believe is still on sale after 15 years either!) is being described by the company as being "like a fusion of off-road power and mechanical precision".

However, its formula of two seats in a cockpit open to the elements, a small-to-non-existent boot and faintly Toytown-esque styling seem more than just a little bit reminiscent of a certain sales flop offered by the company back in the dark days of the mid Nineties.

X-90, anyone?

Top safety ratings for four new cars

FOUR new arrivals at showrooms across the north west have all been given a coveted European safety rating.

Crash test experts at the Euro NCAP programme have confirmed the new Jeep Cherokee, Mercedes-Benz CLA, Suzuki SX-4 and Peugeot 2008 have all been awarded its highest rating of five stars – good news for anyone thinking of buying one.

To find out how your car performed in the tests go to to the Euro NCAP website.

Fire up the... Suzuki Kizashi (UK version)

PART of the problem with new cars these days is that what you see isn't usually what you get. Unless you pay for it as an optional extra, that is.

It's one of the car industry's worst kept secrets that paying for life's little luxuries can add hundreds - sometimes even thousands - of pounds to the price of your pride and joy, but Suzuki is offering an intriguing alternative for anyone infuriated by the confusing, expensive and downright mind-boggling world of the options list.

Put simply, the Kizashi doesn't have one. There's no messing about with gadgets and gizmos on this one - it's £21,995, take it or leave it.

Nor, by the way, is this an accidental reprint of a roadtest that's already appeared in these pages. Life On Cars did get to drive the Kizashi earlier this year, but that was very much a test model to see whether us fussy Brit buyers would go for the idea of a Suzuki saloon, whereas this one is the finished product, subtly retrimmed and re-engineered with the UK's motorists in mind.

That original test version got the thumbs up because it offered buyers things they couldn't get elsewhere and it's much the same story here, with a package that offers saloon virtues without the sheer size of say, a Mondeo or an Insignia. More importantly, while Suzuki's thumbed through the options list on your behalf they've been quite generous with it - the Kizashi's got full leather trim, plenty of toys up front to keep you entertained when you're not pressing on, and a 178bhp, four cylinder petrol engine when you are.

Yet I'd raise the biggest eyebrow of all at the transmission, because unlike just about any other saloon of its size you can press a button and a four wheel drive system comes to life, which should come in handy if you live off your local council's gritting routes. It's mated to a CVT automatic gearbox, and while you can change gear manually using paddles on the steering column, Schumacher-style, the car's character suits leaving it in auto and letting the technology do the hard bit.

The Kizashi then, is the perfect car for people who don't really like cars very much. If you're looking for a no-nonsense package which will get you where you need to be, in all weathers, take a look at one of the 500 Suzuki's planning on shipping over.

Burning rubber at the Jaguar Land Rover factory

IT’S NOT every day one of Britain's biggest car companies lends you an enormous factory car park to play with.

Yet that’s exactly what Jaguar Land Rover did when they lent Aintree Circuit Club the use of part of their Halewood factory – home of the Range Rover Evoque – for an AutoSolo event earlier today, as part of the club’s calendar of motorsport events.

AutoSolo is a great form of entry-level motorsport and a bit of a petrolhead thrill in its own right, because you can enter in pretty much anything in have and blast. The inaugural event at the Jaguar Land Rover factory attracted a pretty eclectic entry list, with everything from cheap ‘n’ cheerful Micras and Corsas, hot hatch classics like the Peugeot 205 GTI and the Golf GTI, and rear wheel drive roadsters like the Caterham Seven and the Mazda MX-5.

The event, held in the factory’s 50th anniversary year, saw an expansive car park converted into a twisty course, which more than thirty cars took a crack at trying to complete.

The competitors made the best of the changeable conditions and used the damp course to get some of the more colourful entries seriously sideways – for me, the highlight of the day was watching one driver drifting his diminutive Suzuki Whizzkid!

If you’d like to find out more about AutoSolo events in the near future, visit the Aintree Circuit Club website for details of forthcoming fixtures.

Aintree Circuit Club are also organising this year's Ormskirk MotorFest, which takes place on August 26. Keep an eye on Life On Cars over the coming weeks for special coverage of the event...

Fire up the... new Suzuki Swift Sport

AT THE bottom of my garden lives a particularly persistent spider.

Each and every morning, without fail, it spins a web right above my back gate, and every other morning I'll forget it's there and get a faceful of silk and flies.

It's annoying, but I wouldn't exactly move house out of arachnid-induced frustration. It was much the same story with the outgoing version of Suzuki's Swift Sport, which had a couple of annoying niggles. In particular, the boot lip's always been a bit too high, which meant lifting bags or suitcases into the back was harder than it should've been. Yet I could forgive it that - and just about everything else - because of the way it went.

The old Swift Sport is still one of the best handling hatchbacks I've ever got my hands on. All of which makes this new version the difficult second album from Suzuki Swift - given how brilliant the original was, surely the larger, lardier replacement can only be a bit worse?

The Swift Sport's not a numbers sort of car but given that's where most of the improvements have been made I'll hit you with some anyway; the 1.6 engine now knocks out 136bhp, making it punchier than its predecessor's, but with carbon emissions now at 147g/km it's cleaner too, and you'll get 44mpg on a good run, 10% more than before. It's also a little larger inside and out, a little quicker and - naturally - a fraction pricer than the old one. It's also something you can't stack up with statistics - to my mind, it's better looking too.

So has it strayed from the winning formula? It's not the reassuring story the minor irritations tell you; that rev-happy engine's still a tiny bit thrashy around town, the interior's still a bit gloomy on longer trips and yes, the boot lip's still too high. It's probably not the best supermini if you're 117 years old, but if you're 17 and value thrills over frills here's the good news.

The new Swift Sport is brilliant.

Because it's a smoother drive the steering doesn't talk to quite as animatedly any more but in every other respect the new one's a belter - if you value handling over grip and power which is better being used on the road than bragged about at the bar, then you'll love the Sport.

It isn't perfect and it's a car of few superlatives, but only because there's no accurate way to measure how much fun it is.

Fire up the... Suzuki Kizashi

THERE is, thanks to mankind's obsession with pigeonholing absolutely everything, a distinct heirachy when it comes to buying a new car.

Whether it's the new Mclaren at the very top end of the motoring marketplace, or the parsimonious Nissan Pixo at the bottom, everything is divided up into convenient classes and segments, so that any particular car is roughly the same size and shape as the ones it's competing against. Anything that breaks the rules just confuses Britain's notoriously fussy buyers.

So can Suzuki's Kizashi, which the Japanese are considering bringing to our shores, carve a niche? It is, after all, an unusual prospect; a Mondeo-style saloon that's smaller than a Mondeo, or an Insignia, or indeed any of the mid-range repmobiles usually found lurking on the outside lanes of Britain's motorways. It honestly could go either way, being either usefully smaller when it comes to parking and navigating the urban jungle, or not as capacious when you call on it to be a cargo freighter. Whatever you make of it, it's a bit bigger than, say, Volkswagen's Jetta but not quite the full Passat.

What it does do though is a passable impression of Doctor Who's TARDIS, because while its smaller exterior does translate into an air of agility from behind the wheel, your passengers in the back seats will swear they've stepped into a larger car. The interior might be a little darker than I'd like, thanks to the black materials used throughout, but boy is it spacious.

It also carries off the clever trick of looking a bit like every other contemporary saloon you've clapped eyes on - the front's got a hint of Golf to it, and the side profile a hint of Mondeo, but again that's not a bad thing.

Expect to pay £21,995 for the automatic, four-wheel-drive version they're bringing to this country's roads, and while I can't see it wiping out the Mondeo's dominance there's definitely a gap in the marketplace for this kind of car.

If you're looking for a sturdy saloon which is a smidgen smaller than the rest of the pack, go and start pestering your local dealer for it.