Suzuki Splash test drive since 2010 hatchback

Suzuki splash test: the main thing is the breed!

Who needs a city car in Russia? It is easy to find the answer to this question. The main buyer of the A-class car is young representatives of office plankton and commercial students, as well as young mothers whose husbands can afford to maintain more than one car in the family.

Who needs a city car? For Europeans, this issue is not relevant, because every family needs a city car there. Regardless of the climate, living standards, loads of roads and the national temperament of Finns and Italians, residents of the British islands and foothills of the Alps drive on small cars, because in the cramped European cities and at the high cost of fuel this is absolutely justified. And also because the population living west of the Bug, following the immortal Ostap Ibragimovich, had long realized that the car was not a luxury, but a means of transportation.

Who needs a city car in Russia? It is easy to find the answer to this question. The main buyer of the A-class car is young representatives of office plankton and commercial students, as well as young mothers whose husbands can afford to maintain more than one car in the family. The fact is that, unlike boys who prefer their first bonuses and parents donated by their parents to spend more on a used car, the girls want to cripple only brand new cars that fit into their relatively modest budgets. Therefore, they buy urban machines, and, as a rule, in a minimum configuration.

For many years of driver’s life, I have repeatedly been sitting behind the wheel of a small car and, frankly, I never experienced joy from this lesson. Therefore, climbing into the salon of the gray-green Suzuki Splash, I was ready for the usual assortment of the pleasures that the A-Class cars give their owners: dystrophic dynamics, shaking suspension, unintelligible steering, wretched interior and shy attempts to catch up for the asphalt at a steep turn. Imagine what my amazement was when I realized that this Japanese City Kar is not able to offer a single point from this menu, which, you see, is very strange!

Indeed, what can be expected from a 1.2-liter engine, which works in a pair not with a manual box or robot or even with a variator, but with a four-band hydratransformer? A similar symbiosis should not go by definition, but this one goes, and how! The feeling is that under the hood there is at least a 1600 cc atmospheric, or it was not without a compressor. But about everything in order, and we will begin, as always, with the salon.

Splash in the top configuration offers a neat fabric interior, hard, but tough, pleasant to the touch and not explosive plastic, air conditioning, electric windows of the front and a decent sounding stereo system with control on the steering wheel. The seats of the first row are not very soft, but not oak, with good lateral support, behind the sofa, which, of course, can be laid out to make the volumetric compartment for baggage. When the back of the sofa stands vertically, only the name remains from the trunk in reality, and in theory and in consolation to the owner of 178 liters. Due to the fact that the 5-door Splash is very short, only 3.7 meters, its salon also does not differ in space, so passengers are higher than average height that sit in the back seat, you have to rest on the backs of the front seats.

But how much space there are above your head! You can sit not just in the hat, but even in the cylinder, although I personally did not try. As I already said, Splash in the option with a 94-horsepower engine and an automatic box is surprisingly dynamic, and its edification is especially felt in the range from 0 to 80 km/h, that is, at speeds characteristic of movement in the city. Closer to a hundred, it becomes more recent, although here it is sensitive to the slightest manipulation with the gas pedal. Moderately a sharp, informative steering wheel and a perfectly balanced suspension with tenacious rubber give the driver a feeling of freedom and safety in any road situations. I don’t know what algorithm and on which supercomputer Japanese designers counted on, but it doesn’t work at all like most A-class cars. Despite the relatively short base and a striking body height, Splash does not go out on irregularities and potholes and does not fall from side to side with high -speed maneuvers. He sits tightly on the road, simultaneously swallowing irregularities on the asphalt. In a word, he behaves unexpectedly thoroughbly, well, as if more precisely, to describe this, imagine that the character and temperament of a serious expensive golf-class car shoved into the tight building of the city machine. It is difficult to imagine, but the dynamics, controllability and comfort of Suzuki Splash is a couple of classes higher than such a car, as they say, by rank. And at the same time, he is strikingly little. At first, I even thought that the car has incorrectly works a liquid crystal indicator of the fuel level: you wound one ten kilometers after another, and it is not from a place! I did not specifically count, but it seems that the Japanese would not be cunning, saying that Splash consumes 7 liters per hundred when driving around the city.

Finally, a few words about the pricing policy of the manufacturer. Among automobile journalists, it has long circulating the opinion that Suzuki lifts up prices for its products, which, they say, for the money that they ask for Splash, you can purchase a decent grade with a class above or twice (!) Support the domestic manufacturer. These reasoning are given to socialist realism, according to the canons of which the author had to tell the truth, but not all.

Summary
In the Russian market in the A-Class car, Suzuki Splash has several competitors, both European and Asian (not Japanese) production, and all of them are really noticeably cheaper, and the difference can be from 60 to 200 (!) Thousand rubles. However, what does the consumer receive for this money? A weak liter motor and a mechanical box, not to mention a hard suspension and slurred controllability. Modifications with a 1.2-liter engine and a robotic box, in which there are much more disadvantages than advantages, are selected almost close to the SPLASH. If we talk about the cars of the class above, then for the same money, you can really swing to a worthy model of a good brand. But this will be a combination of a low -power engine, a mechanical box and air conditioner (at best) with a complete absence of goodies that are inherent in the magnificent (I am not afraid of this word) to the Suzuki car, that is, speakers, efficiency, ergonomics and unsurpassed Japanese quality. An unambiguous recommendation for acquisition.

The price of a test copy: from 535 500 rubles.


 

A source: Business car club