It sometimes feels like the Fun Police are everywhere. Any wheeled activity remotely titillating or exciting these is probably expensive, inaccessible, or liable to get you arrested. But don’t worry Autopians. As your resident rebel-without-a-clue I have just the antidote: an budget thrill ride that proves all is not yet lost. A car that will have you making handbrake turns straight back to 1993.
I was never into hot hatchbacks when I first started driving. My mates and I hailed from dirt poor east London, so our religion was cheap RWD Fords. But if I had access to a Suzuki Swift Sport back then, I can confidently say Friday nights there’d be a McDonalds chocolate milkshake in the cupholder, ‘Leave Home’ by the Chemical Brothers would be blaring out the stereo on repeat, and I’d have it on three wheels lapping an Essex town center one way system. One hand across the steering wheel with a thumb hooked through a spoke, the other hovering between gear knob and handbrake. It’s just that kind of car.
In the ’80s and ’90s family shopper hatches announced their performance credentials with chunky alloys, flashy red trim and badges denoting what flavor of power increase they had under the bonnet – sixteen valves, fuel injection or a turbo. In these eco-conscious times, such brashness just won’t do. The Swift Sport takes a much more acceptable and oh so twenty first century approach – it’s now a mild hybrid.
A Swift Bit of History
In one form or another, the Swift has been around since 1983. According to the dreaded Wikipedia, the project originated at GM as the M-car. GM being their usual hapless selves thought they wouldn’t make any money on the little car, so passed it to Suzuki in exchange for five percent of the Japanese company. Sold as the Cultus in Japan, GM versions were sold in North America as the Chevrolet Sprint, Pontiac Firefly and in Australia as the Holden Barina.
The second-generation Swift arrived in 1989 and was everything everywhere all at once. The global manufacture and marketing of where it was built and what names it was sold under worldwide is too tedious to go into here, but what’s important is that it tip-toed onto US soil as the Geo Metro.
With a lowercase i to distinguish it from the Golf, which VW were pissed about, the little Swift GTi was always on the undercard compared to the main event Peugeot 205 and 309 GTIs, the Golf GTI, Astra GTE, and of course the Escort XR3i. Its virtues of a lower purchase price, smaller size and lighter weight to made up for its lack of outright grunt and prestige. Golf aside, none of those other heavy hitters survived the great hot hatch massacre of the mid-nineties, rising insurance rates smiting them a death blow the same way they did for muscle cars twenty-five years earlier.
You can’t keep a decent hatch down. In 2004, the Swift was reintroduced as a totally new model that owed nothing to its tinny M-car based predecessors. Despite being shaped like a clothes iron with wrap-around glazing, the new Swift Sport had zingy naturally aspirated engines and a lightness on their feet that made them a favorite of enthusiasts with a shallow wallet everywhere. The Swift Sport regularly found its way onto car magazines’ self-important yearly best-of lists.
The latest Swift Sport will ring the till for £24,270 ($29,490), a hefty seven grand over the base non-Sport Swift. That puts it in direct competition with the standard 3-door Mini Cooper (from £23k or $28k) but a VW Polo GTI is – excuse me while I piss myself laughing – £30k ($36.5k), although that car does have a bigger engine and much more power.
Now With Added Boosterjet!
Boosterjet sounds like the sort of bullshit suffix you would see plastered all over advertising when Communists were hiding under the bed–would sir or madam care to look over the new Boosterjet food mixers? It’s Suzuki’s name for the range of engines powering the Swift. They use a smaller turbo bolted directly to the cylinder head for quicker heating and spool-up times. It also helps keep the 1.4-liter four-cylinder compact. The hybrid system consists of an integrated starter generator in between the engine and gearbox, a small li-ion battery and a DC-to-DC converter to down step the voltage from 48v to 12v for the accessories. These gubbins are stuffed under the front seats, so interior room and hip point (the height of the front occupant’s hip from the ground plane, a key dimension in how a car is packaged) aren’t affected. Suzuki claims the hybrid system only adds 15 kg (33 lbs.) in weight – the whole car is a tiddly 1025kg (2260 lbs.).
Despite being a hybrid there’s no electric-only running here. Small turbo engines can be a bit all-or-nothing boosty; the Suzuki system cuts in when you toe it from low engine speeds to help out the motor when it’s working hardest, increasing torque and pumping up the area under the curve. Does it work?
The power figures are 127 bhp at 5500 rpm and 173 lbs. ft at 2000 rpm so it’s a torquer not a singer. Sounding anodyne until you plant it, the engine suddenly turns growly and you get going smartly. Suzuki claims the 0-60 is 9.1 seconds, but this is the old Japanese ‘under promise and over deliver’ performance trick – my completely scientific and journalistically rigorous butt timer clocked it much quicker than that, hampered only by the limiter cutting in just before 6000 rpm. The gearbox, positive in normal use can occasionally get a bit flummoxed by an across the plane downshift; the upside is extremely rapid progress can be made just sticking to third and fourth gear and riding the wave. So there’s a bit of a disconnect going on here, because the little Suzuki feels like the sort of car that should have its neck wrung, not short-shifted to avoid running out of revs.
From the moment you pull away this little Suzuki buzzes with messages – it’s alive and communicative. The steering is wicked – the wheel chatters away constantly with direction and surface information while being whip-crack responsive and nice to hold – not too thick and with a nice tactility to it. The suspension which can be a bit joggly around town, will keep your butt informed what’s what once you head out onto a British B road – you know exactly what all four corners of the car are up to. The beauty of pint-sized cars like the Swift is how handy their size is when you want to have fun – the road is suddenly a lot wider and most of the time you don’t even need to brake – tight bends can be wazzed around a right old rate of knots. Just flick your wrist and you’re in. Even though it was wet (AGAIN) while I had it, never once did standing water, damp road markings or tarmac with the friction of a wet bathroom floor cause any brown alerts. There is traction control, along with a suite of keep the NCAP bods happy safety systems but these can all be turned off with a prolonged press of one button. But you don’t really need to as they’re completely unobtrusive, and with 195 tires on a 17” rim the Swift only struggled for traction momentarily when attempting a Gran Prix style standing start. When I went to my RC race meeting on Friday night, the weather was absolutely torrential – Storm Babet was in the middle of plunging the UK underwater – but the Swift shrugged it off with the composure of a much bigger car.
Pool Balls And Baseballs
Getting into the Swift Sport is like slipping on my favorite Air Max 90s – cozy and sporty but tactile. VP of GM Design Bill Mitchell used to liken this to the difference between a pool ball and a baseball. You’d get bored fondling the former but the latter would keep your hands entertained for hours. The red flashes of yore have migrated from the outside to the inside, across the door panels and dashboard. The seats cocooned me pleasantly and I had a terrific driving position nailed thirty seconds after finding all the adjustment levers. There are normal analog gauges with a small screen in between that can be configured to show the sort of thing I thought was incongruous on an old Nissan Juke but is quite fun here: turbo boost levels, accelerator and brake position, the all-important fuel economy and something that looks like a Star Trek tactical display but I think is a G-force indicator. The touchscreen controls the navigation and audio but feels a generation behind. Functionally it’s fine, just a bit clunky graphically. Wired Carplay was a bit twitchy for the first couple of days but behaved itself after that. After my problems with the Dacia, maybe I need a new lead.
I’m always banging on about packaging – what’s impressive about the Swift is although it’s only 70 mm (about 3”) longer than a Mini Cooper, it’s a much more practical device. The rear is cozy for me, although my as-usual mohawk remained unflattenend. The back of Mini I could barely contort my supermodel legs into. With 265 liters (9.4 cu ft) of space compared to the Mini’s 211 liters (7.4 cu ft) the Suzuki easily swallowed my RC gear. The other thing I’m always going on about is hidden rear door handles. So let me go on record as to why exactly I hate them.
Firstly, they’re unergonomic. Considering it’s most likely children who will be getting in the back they’re too high and your hands can slip out of flap, especially if it’s raining. Secondly, they don’t create the illusion of a three-door car, because the B pillar is in the wrong place. Take a look at the Futurista Lancia Delta restomod if you don’t believe me. Lastly, they add cost and complexity because you’re tooling up for additional parts instead of just using the same door handle as the front. Although I don’t have kids, I do like to chuck my jacket and bag on the back seat so they’re out of the way. I suppose hidden door handles will at least confuse would-be thieves at the traffic lights.
Go-faster hatches used to be all about affordable fun, without giving up any practicality. Take your B class hatch, drop in the motor from the next model up the range, tighten up the suspension, stick on some funky graphics and alloy wheels, watch the sales roll in. Every OEM had some variation of the theme in the showroom. These days you have very few options left. The Abarth 595 (which I haven’t driven, for reasons) is smaller and more anti-social. The Mini Cooper is slicker and more premium, but nowhere near as useful. The Fiesta ST, like anything from past masters the French, is dead.
The Swift Sport isn’t pretentious or flashy. It’s not the smoothest or the most refined. What it is, is more fun than Saturday night naked Twister. From the moment you get in the sheer brio and engagement of it is infectious. In that way it feels like an homage to those great GTIs of the past. It’s one of those cars that makes you look for an excuse to take for a quick spin – I’m just popping out for an hour to get some more cat food. Fifi now has enough in the house to sink a battleship.
I can almost forgive it the hidden rear door handles. Almost.
- Two Flavors Of Suzuki: 1987 Samurai vs 1993 Swift
- The Suzuki Spacia Base Shouts Its Modest Trim-Level From The Rooftops, And That’s Delightfully Weird
- The Forgotten Suzuki Verona Was A Strange But Comfy Ex-Daewoo With An Unexpected Porsche Engine
- Silly Little Red Things: 2000 Kia Sportage vs 1997 Suzuki X-90
If you want to keep teasing us with forbidden fruit, I’d love to see how the new Hyundai i30N compares to its rivals in the Type R and GTI. Especially if it’s still offered as a fastback or wagon. Same goes for the i20N, which I guess is the EU Veloster?
I´d say that the I30N is more like the veloster, in terms of size, than an I20N would be, because the I20 is roughly the size of a Fiesta and the I30 is the size of a Focus.
I´m not Adrian but I can tell you that most people I know have switched from a GTI to an I30N and haven´t looked back. Now, the CTR, in my opinion, is a level above of what a I30N is in terms of performance (reflected in its price); the direct competitors of the hyundai would be cars like the mk4 focus st (280 ps), the golf GTI…
The I20N competes directly with cars like the Fiesta ST, though it is a bit expensive (there´s only a diference of 5000 euros between the I20N and the I30N where I live, and I´d pick the I30N over the smaller car 10/10 times).
I used to have the American version of the post-facelift i30, the Elantra GT. It was with the purchase of my 2018 base model that I learned an important car-buying lesson; if the better engine option only costs slightly more, get it. Going with the GT instead of the GT Sport caused a significant hit to its resale value.
I’ve now moved on to drooling over Mustangs and Camaros and it seems the I4 turbos/V6s go for half what the V8s are.
Just when you think everything brilliant about hot hatches has already been written. Way to go Adrian. I wish they sold those across the pond over here in the big, dumb USA.
Ha, my first car was a 1998 1.0 Swift (MK3) with a banging 54bhp (if I remember correctly); it was the epitome of “slow car fast”, not to mention mk1 and mk2 GTis – these were the true heroes, and very popular among amateur rally/autocross crowds. You can still buy rally-prep swifts here, and they are trully competetive.
In Australia we have a race series using the Swift Sport. Great racing! Great fun! https://www.facebook.com/swiftracingseries/
Someone needs to replicate this in a private lobby in GT7.
I just sold my 2009 swift sport, yellow! Loved that car. Mine had some expensive issues at the end but I have fond memories.
My new Hilux is great, functional, comfortable, but doesn’t have the silliness of a bright yellow hatchback that just wanted to play.
Suzuki messed up by not offering the new Swift here.
They were really ahead of their time with the awesome cool small cars they make. The cute lil Metro/Swift, and the awesome Tracker/Sidekick/Vitara left just as small crossover SUV’s were getting popular.
Maybe GM can sell it here as the Chevy Metro. Too bad they never sold a Metro SS 😀
Thanks for the great review Adrian! I’ve lusted HARD for a contemporary Suzuki Swift ever since seeing Doug DeMuro’s review of one from Mexico a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmghN0DbYys …it’s exactly what I’d love to have as a daily driver and just before the pandemic (when car prices were still somewhat sane) apparently late model Swifts sold in the mid-teens just over the border from me.
I did a bit of googling to see what’s involved in trying to buy a car in Mexico and then bring it back and register/insure it permanently here in California, and while I don’t think it’s impossible, it seemed uncertain enough to pour cold water on the idea.
What an awesome little car at a semi-reasonable price for a change (last time I looked, they sold for the US equivalent of the low 20s in Mexico). Basic and light and fun and even a bit practical… I for one wouldn’t ask for more (other than an interesting color, which I didn’t see). 🙂
Things have changed since the Cultus. In the late ’80s I swapped my Festiva for one for a couple of days – the Cultus had possibly the worst steering of any car I have driven, absolutely no indication of which way the wheels were pointing until the car started changing direction.
The Abarth is more anti-social? Welp, that’s my enthusiasm for the lil Suzuki ruined. If it’s not at least as absurd or more than a 500/595 Abarth, I will be bored to death.
Tbh, I would totally rock a new Jimny and Swift if Suzuki were still in the US.
How could would it be to have a Jimny for off-road and a Swift road on-road? Being American is so lame sometimes.
As the owner of a survivor, I must defend the Swift GTi.
The engine was the real story. A high revving twin cam 1.3 with 100hp and a broad powerband. Built like a bike motor with forged internals and a high for the time compression ratio, this thing could fling the Swift’s 1750 pounds off the line with authority.
Being a very cheap car, it was lacking in many areas, but power was not one of them.
It was as quick off the line as some V8 sports cars of the time, and notably quicker than the car you feature here.
It is my favorite car and I really appreciate you mentioning it here.
It sounds like the soul of the Swift GTi is intact with this new model.
Suzuki’s small European and jdm offerings won’t interest most Americans, although Canadians would gobble them up.
Suzuki, please come back to Canada!
I remember when the Swift GTi came out, good on you for having one! R&T (I think) had an article called something like “beat the rat race” somewhere back in 89′-91′? Where they took a Swift GTi, and mildly modified it with a thicker rear sway bar, Polly suspension bushings, maybe a freezer flowing intake and exhaust and had what seemed like a he’ll of a good time with it. Flinging 1750 lbs. with that torquey what 110 hp 1.3 4 cylinder? Sounds like a great recipe!
In fact that’s really close to weight and he of the original (mk 1) golf tdi
And this new swift at roughly 2200 lbs and 135 hp is very close to the weight and he figures of the mk2 Golf GTI!
Though I haven’t read that article for well over 20 years, I remember it well.
I used to scour the web for any Swift GTi stuff I could find in the 90s.
I currently have an STi, but the Suzuki is still a riot to drive and genuinely feels fast.
They are a real unicorn in Canada now since the salt sent pretty much all of them to their grave.
The TV advertisement with them lowering a rolls-Royce Merlin engine into the engine bay
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GDUf4Pu9bEU
was almost enough reason to buy one
Wow!!! I can’t stop laughing!
I can’t believe I’ve never seen that
You just made me so happy!
I can’t resist offering a state-side version of Adrian’s reminiscence of ’90s motoring – here it was often USDM sport coupes of the SW Gossin beloved, FWD variety, Nirvana on the CD player (skipping on the bumps), and a Slurpee in the cupholder as you did donuts in parking lots. Good times.
I can’t fucking stand Nirvana, and not because they killed my beloved hair metal. Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam are more my thing.
I personally never gave up on Van Halen. Liked ’em until the very end.
(I also dug Chemical Bros for that brief time when electronica surfaced here in the ’90s…and I’ll say it, I even enjoyed the Prodigy too, for all its breath-mint longevity)
Never liked the Prodigy either, a bit working class for me. The best record review I ever read was for ‘Block Rockin’ Beats’:
“there’s an extremely loud warehouse rave going on, the police turn up sirens wailing and arrest everyone, and the only person left who should have been arrested, is Mark King of Level 42 still up on stage playing slap bass..”
Moby was always my guy – his stuff was everywhere back then, even tv commercials.
The genre has overall kinda died down now here, but…LCD Soundsystem does a fair job of reminding us that it once was a cool thing. Daft Punk played at their house even.
At one point Moby had more of his songs featured in commercials than any any other artist in history
His honesty and reasoning impressed me – that sure he gets money for it, but it’s also a way to expose people to his music, people who might never think to listen to it, and maybe they’ll like it.
Love or hate Level 42, Mark King is a BEAST.
AiC is the best of the flannel bunch by far. Pearl Jam sounds like a 13-year-old boy’s breaking voice doing a tone-deaf impression of a bereaved goat.
Naughty step. Now.
Must have been nice to be rich enough to have a CD player BUILT IN to the car! I had the hand-me-down Discman that connected to the car stereo via a little cassette tape. It skipped so much I can’t even believe I found it worthwhile.
Back in the day I had a Canada spec Swift GTi (16v). I deeply regret letting it go, but I really needed something bigger at that point in my life. I got over ten years of carefree life out of it and I know the second owner got at least five more. I used to joke that it was like a pet, it would only refuse to start if it sensed it was going to the vet for maintenance. If I kept it away from mechanics, it was happy. It would whisper things like “this oil has been good for 50k KM, it’s proven, why would it need changing” and “if you keep those greasy goons with the wrenches out of me, I promise you another 100k KM trouble free”. All that in a 100HP car that a bunch of friends and I once picked up and lifted over a snowbank we thought I couldn’t drive through.
Compared to the over styled mess featured here, that little clean egg with a simple gimmick free interior was such a happy place. And I second the criticism of those c-pillar door handles. In fact I amplify them.
I want to dive deeper. What kind of RC racing are you into? Might we see some scale write ups in our future? Can we get a scale version of the Autopian!? I’m into RC as a hobby and would love to find some places that are much less “brotherhood” than what seems to be out there.
Agreed. There seem to be more than a few of us into RC stuff.
I race Tamiya stock touring on Friday nights. Indoors on carpet. 21.5t brushless, limited upgrades allowed. Keeps it close and cheap.
Sounds like a blast. My dad and I are building a TT-02SR Tamiya chassis right now. It’s our first Tamiya build and it’s been a fun project.
I’m into aerial things like planes. And making my ground vehicles temporarily turn into aerial vehicles. Fixing the aerial vehicles that are temporarily ground vehicles is somewhere in there too.
The whole Z-axis thing adds a whole other level of complexity. Right now, I’m rocking an overbuilt monster truck for general mayhem and I’m dangerous enough only having X/Y-axis outside of the occasional jump.
The beauty of pint-sized cars like the Swift is how handy their size is when you want to have fun – the road is suddenly a lot wider and most of the time you don’t even need to brake – tight bends can be wazzed around a right old rate of knots. Just flick your wrist and you’re in.
This is a big reason I love my Fiesta ST. I can fling it through low speed turns at much greater velocity than people would expect.
At under 2300 pounds the Swift isn’t much heavier than an EG Civic and since it has 30 extra horsepower over the normal EG motor and 30 years of suspension technology advancement the fun should be commensurately greater.
If I tend to rail against the “all crossovers, all the time” trend it’s because fun, quirky little cars like this are quickly going extinct especially in the US market.
I’ll never understand the pricing scheme of VW group. It’s almost like they are begging you to buy the Skoda over VW.
But that little 1.0L VW mill (be it in a Skoda, VW, or even if you’re unfortunate to have a SEAT instead) is delightfully suprising.
Skodas are expensive now.
The Fabia with the 1.5TSI is same price range as this Swift (~25-26k)
Stop ruining my half-assed sarky takes with your facts.
“Everything is expensive”
Wait, a hybrid with a stick??? Why oh why do I not have one? Oh yeah Murica or some shit like that ((
The USDM Honda CRZ, Insight, and Civic Hybrid in the 2000s could all be had with manuals. Replacement battery packs for those are affordable and still available too, so even if they’re degraded it’s not a big deal. These are not expensive cars on the used market either. If you’re for whatever reason unwilling to consider owning a mid-2000s Honda, that’s the only reason you don’t have a manual hybrid.
You raise an interesting question in my mind – what’s the take on the CRZ now? When it came out, it was derided as a CRX in style only. But I could see time having been kind to it, and the idea of a small hatch now is positively alluring.
As I understand it now, the main thing people don’t like about the CRZ is just its styling and the fact that it has no back seat in USDM spec. But if you don’t mind those things, it’s fine. And one of the rare manual hybrids.
I wonder if it’ll be sought after in 10-15 years (when everything has become a mash-up of an SUV and a minivan, basically commercial truck-sized things with leather seats and gadgets), with a “nobody appreciated it at the time, but it really was the second coming of the CRX!”
I still think Kissy Suzuki is the best Suzuki ever, but the Swift Sport would make for a nice consolation prize.
Would have gone road RGV250 or Kevin Schwantz Lucky Strike RGV500 myself, but I’ll allow it.
I have had many of the Ignis Sports, Suzuki really know how to do the warm hatch thing. The joy of the older ones was just wringing them out and using all of the revs, something that may be a little lost on the current generation. But that’s more of a modern car trade off.
As a former owner of an SX4, seeing the Swift overseas hurts. I miss Suzuki, and my old SX4, badly.
The UK auto market seems in a lot of ways as an alternative universe to that of the U.S.
A lot is similar (you like jeeps too, both have/had plenty of the same models of multinational cars), but there’s interesting and noticeable little differences, like Suzuki’s success.
Always basically the answer to a trivia question here in the States, it’s fascinating to imagine “what if?” looking at Suzuki in the UK and pondering say the SX4 that we briefly had here and wondering what could have been.
I’ve always liked the Swift Sport though I’ve never even seen one in person. They seem like such great little cars..
But what the fuck is going on with the badging on the liftgate? We get no fewer than 5 typefaces (ok sure, one’s the logo) and 5 badges, were told it’s a Suzuki twice, and the blue hybrid badge clashes with the red on the sport. That’s a whole damn mess.
I always loved these years ago. When Suzuki exited the US automotive market, I honestly felt like it was only a matter of time until Pleistocene sized SUV’s dominated the ecosystem. As it turns out, I was correct in my assumptions. The average heft of consumer vehicles has increased to match the average heft of the heifers they portage around to little league and dance recitals. The whole thing is a nightmare I wish I could forget.
Bring back the small things.
I looked at an SX4 back in the mid-2000s, and really liked the overall package (I own a Suzuki motorcycle with which I’ve been nothing but happy…it’s insanely durable) BUT in the back of mind was “how long is Suzuki going to be here, and will be I be scrounging around for parts in a few years/asking Vin Diesel to overnight them from Japan?!”
So yeah…I bought a Focus instead.
More fun than Naked Twister? Really? You must not be playing with the right people.
Good story, thanks.
You play with what you have, not what you wish you had.
It is like the nude beach. The naked people are not the ones who you want to see naked. No supermodels but plenty of grandparents.
Darling this is me. I’m only friends with beautiful people.
And yet your comment that leads us to assume your naked twister partners are less than attractive? I assume this involves different amounts of alchohol?
Look, I didn’t have all my witty replies planned out in advance. I’m winging it here.
Okay I didn’t read anything before drinking alot of vodka and begin reading. We all have problems not too mention 1st day of snow.
You’re assuming Adrian is friends with his naked Twister partners.
Anyone ever mentioned you look like a n actor in the American version of Ghost? Yet another ripoff of quality British TV Shows? Don’t fret one of the smarter nicer attractive ghosts
Pro tip: A couple bottles of cooking oil is the great leveller in naked twister. Also, complete darkness.
Isn’t that just a dark room?
My fiancée has the previous Swift Sport (130bhp revvy 1.6) and it is hilarious. More fun to drive than my mk3 MR2, and about the same weight.
Amazing little car.