Suzuki eVitara: A Surprising Small EV With BIG Off-Road Ability!
Hello friends, welcome to the new Suzuki E Vitara. And let’s just cut straight to the chase cuz I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Oh, good. Yet another forgettable, amorphous, compact crossover thing.” That’s you. You’re thinking that. I would never say something like that. That’s unprofessional. You’re thinking that and you’re wrong because this is no compact crossover. No, this this is a small SUV. And there is a difference. Let’s all say it together on three. 1 2 3. Actual off-roading ability. Yes, that’s right. This high-rising plastic clad box can actually do the thing all the others pretend they can do. Or at least so Suzuki says. So we better go find a muddy field and find out for ourselves, hadn’t we? Our three free YouTube channels on EVs and clean tech are funded by our fun-packed test drivetastic events in Farmra, London, the Southwest, the North, Melbourne, and Sydney. Next up, Everything Electric Melbourne. And new for UK viewers, you can buy a battery electric vehicle or more at everythingleelectric.store. Back to the episode. Right then, squatty. Here we go. The first ever electric Suzuki. We’re running out of first evers. Suzuki, fun fact, the last normal brand to bring an EV to market in the UK. I think I’m writing saying that. I looked at a big list before writing this script and I’m pretty sure after these guys now it’s just boutiquey brands like Katum and Morgan and high-end brands like Bentley and Ferrari and Lamborghini who are yet to bring something electric to market. Everyone else has done so. So yes, Suzuki are late, but then again, Japan as a whole are late when it comes to electric vehicles. Cast your eyes over the Japanese EV offerings that we’ve seen in the last 10 years from Honda, Mazda, Toyota, Nissan. How many can you honestly say made a splash? Did any of them the Hondaeree maybe very charming, very stylish, completely flawed as a product because it was too expensive and didn’t go far enough. And I have to admit on a personal note, there has been a hole in my life where interesting, beautifully built, top drawer Japanese stuff should be. So, it’s really encouraging to see collectively that the Japanese car industry are starting to take this seriously as evidenced by the new Nissan Leaf and Nissan Micro that we’ve seen this year. Hopefully, as evidenced by this. So, let’s start with the EV under bits and prepare to be pleasantly surprised and mildly impressed. The platform is a proper bespoke EV platform. It’s called the Hartense E. It’s developed with and will be shared with Toyota and also Dhatsu. In other news, Dhatsu are still a thing. Hello, Copen EV. Can we have one of those, please? That platform will very shortly spawn a small electric Toyota that’s called the Urban Cruiser, which is is this and that kind of share a Rena 5, Nissan Micro relationship. They’re very, very similar cars, same platform, quite similar exteriors, very similar interiors, but Suzuki say that they did the most work developing it, and hence they get to go first with their new car. You can have it with a 49 or 61 kWh battery. You can have it as front-wheel drive, single motor or four-wheel drive, dual motor. That’s the first distinct unique thing about this car. All Suzukis are available with four-wheel drive. It’s a really interesting quirk of the brand. And in terms of small electric crossovers, of all of them, there is but one offered with four-wheel drive currently, which is the Volvo EX30. And actually, the dual motor version of that is like 40 grand. I don’t think we’re going to get to do quite enough driving today to give a really useful efficiency reading, but Suzuki claims it’s a little bit less than four or a little bit more than four depending on which version you get, which is distinctly fine. It means a maximum range if you go a big battery frontwheel drive of 265 miles, which is fine. And actually fine is pretty impressive considering just how late these guys are. Because think about the first electric Subaru, the Sulttera, the first electric Toyota, the BZ 4X, the not even first, second electric Honda, the ENY1. All miles off the pace in terms of efficiency, in terms of range compared to the rivals that they’re priced in line with in terms of price. Arriving this late to the game and being pretty average in terms of the EV hardware that you’re bringing is quite impressive, especially when the price is right. And the price is pretty good. Entry- level version, small battery, a little over 26 grand. Big battery version starts at a little over 29,000. That’s nice. 60 kWh battery, sub30,000 price. Bearing in mind, Suzuki don’t qualify for the UK government grant. So, they’ve just done it themselves. They’ve just added a huge discount to their cars before they’ve even launched in order to bring them in line with stuff that does qualify for the Dizzy. But again, the most interesting one to me is that top spec, the big battery four-wheel drive car, just over £31,000. Close to 10 grand less than the only rival it really has, which is the dual motor Volvo EX30. So, this is big differentiator number one for me is this is a little high- riding plastic clad crossover that could actually do off-roading stuff if it needed to instead of all the others which pretend that they could but absolutely couldn’t and are just small hatchbacks jacked up for no reason. Couple of grumbles just before we go off-roading. Number one, impressively small boot for its size. That’s teeny weeny. Just over 300 L. Of course, you don’t get the big kind of mega boot underneath like you would in a Ford Puma because there has to be room for the rear motor because it’s a four-wheel drive car. Um, you can slide the rear seats forwards and backwards, recline them forwards and backwards. That’s another kind of distinguishing feature that you don’t get on other small crossovers, but because the boot floor is so high, it only marginally increases the boot capacity while completely chopping off the rear occupants legs. I have more grumbles of a technical nature, but um let’s go get muddy first. All right, we’ve got a nice steep little very muddy down and up here. There’s going to be moments where certain wheels will have no grip whatsoever or just be stuck in a muddy ditch like there. But what we basically have is two limited slip differentials, one on each end. So if this wheel is stuck, it just breaks that wheel, sends power to this one, wiggles you out of trouble, then distributes the power evenly once it’s suitable to do so. These are the cool things you can do with electric off-roaders. It’s really, really simple to do stuff like that. Send the power exactly where you need it. That used to be complex mechanicals. Now it’s just an electric brain. Now, a better way to demonstrate the limited slip diffs is to go quite quickly over some really slippery stuff. So here’s a slalom course. Oh, I can feel that there. You can feel the outside wheels pulling you around. Very good, little Suzuki. Come on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A little electric crossover on road tires. Shouldn’t be doing that. That is genuinely impressive. I mean, fair play. Whatever else we end up concluding about this car, and it’s not going to all be positive. What I can safely say is if you’re looking for a small electric crossover that can really actually properly go off-road, this is the option. I mean, what else is there, right? Then interior of the Evitara. So, this is going to be a mixed bag. Let’s do uh let’s do a compliment sandwich. We’ll start off with some good things and then we’ll talk about some less good things and we’ll finish with a good thing. No, because we’re optimists here at Everything Electric. So, good things. Quite like the way it looks in this trim. Quite cheerful. The chunky aesthetic of the exterior is matched on the interior. I like that there’s big easy to hit buttons everywhere so that you could operate them while wearing big gloves while driving up a mountain in Scotland in the dead of winter. Very good. Very rugged and practical. Uh, I like the kind of different colors and materials. I’ve always said texture and color is a great way to cheer up a cabin in an affordable car when you can’t lean on really premium materials. And they’ve they’ve really taken that to heart here. There’s a lot of different textures and materials. But I like it mostly. You sit noticeably high for car of this nature. A lot of these crossovers, you don’t actually sit any higher than a normal car. But in this, they’ve really made a point of putting you up to uh well, again, reaffirm that this is an SUV. It could go off-road. It’s chunky and capable persona and it matches with it. So, I’m fine with that. And then probably best thing of all is how much kit you get as standard. This is one of the pillars of Suzuki. It’s one of the things they always try to do is give you loads and loads of stuff as standard, like loads of ADAS features that are optional extras on rival cars. adaptive cruise control, the reclining and sliding rear seats in the back, heat pump as standard across all cars. We like that. Those were some good things. Now, we’ll move on to some bad things. Most of the materials I like this massive piece of fingerprinty piano black in the middle. I dislike the amount of bezel on this dual screen setup is absolutely staggering. Look at that. I could get my whole hand in between the two screens there. What’s the point of that space there? Why are we doing that? More incredible is the forehead on this gauge cluster. That is a gigantic forehead. And let me tell you, I know a thing or two about those. Why do you think I’ve got these curtains? I mean, I appreciate that it’s kind of obscured by the steering wheel and you know, Kia put climate controls there and I moan about that, too. So, maybe there’s no winning, but I don’t know. It just looks weird and outdated to have so much empty space. Could we not just have had two separate screens with small frames instead of this massive piece? But the design of the screens pales in comparison to the quality of the software that you find when you go into the screens. This software is somewhere between infuriating and unusable. I mean, it’s it’s astonishingly slow, but the menu design is unfathomable. It’s like it’s like trying to crack a riddle trying to figure out how to turn your heated seat off or like we would you know when we were driving here this morning we filmed a little intro and the navigation was talking to us. You wouldn’t even believe how long it took myself and camera man Andy to figure out how to turn off the audible directions for the satnav. We both do this for a living. We had to pull over in a layby and really put our heads together to figure it out. Heated seats look no buttons for them. Annoying. Okay, fine. Go into the climate menu. Still no heated seats. Really annoying. I have to go into the heated seats submen and then the world’s most laggy graphic of two chairs pointlessly, you know, animates itself and then finally I I can Oh, it’s not even that. I press that button and then I choose my level of seat heatery. That is just bad UX. It’s just bad. Thankfully, Apple CarPlay as standard, Android Auto as standard. So, fingers crossed you’ll have to interact with this very little. Compliment sandwich. Compliment sandwich. Compliment sandwich. I think that this glove box lid has a nice weight to it. Back seats. Now, bear in mind, bespoke EV architecture. We know what that means. It means more space in the back. And this is a small car, but there are small cars this size with excellent room in the back. Kia EV3. Same size. Very spacious in the back. How are we looking? Well, oh yeah. No, actually really good. You You don’t have a head, right? If you don’t have a head, it’s fantastic. Leg room. Superb. This seat’s way back in my driving position. Very happy with my leg room. Why am I sat in the nose bleeds? What? Why? This is a bespoke EV platform. Why am I six feet off the ground with my I know I’m tall, but there are cars this size that I fit fine in the back of in terms of headroom. I feel like the retractable sunroof is eating a lot of my headroom. Maybe the entry- level version without the sunroof has a bit more room in the back, but uh I can’t see I’m feel like I’m massively reaping the rewards of that bespoke architecture at this exact moment. Okay, out on the road, the tarmac road in the Evara. We know it’s good off-road. What about on it? Well, again, good stuff, bad stuff. Let’s do a compliment sandwich. Good stuff. Pretty efficient. I said I wouldn’t comment too much on efficiency because we’ve not done that many miles today, but from a relatively short drive on a on a cold day in the UK, we’ve been doing 4 miles to the kilowatt hour, which is fine. It’s perfectly fine. And more importantly, it’s roughly what Suzuki claims it can do. It’s refreshing to note that I feel less and less brands are throwing out these wildly overly ambitious range figures and efficiency numbers for their new EVs. They’re giving us more realistic data now, which is good news for consumers who don’t know much about EVs, buying their first electric car, and will buy based on those numbers. The other thing I really like about the way this thing moves down the road, it’s hard to put your finger on where it’s coming from, but there’s a sense of solidity, toughness. It just feels like a really wellbuilt, sturdy little object. I don’t know if it’s placebo from all the kind of chunky exterior and interior design or the knowledge that you can have it with four-wheel drive. This one’s the two wheel drive, but it just feels like a tough little guy. And I really like that in a car. Often a trait of Japanese cars. I remember the first time I drove a Subaru. It was a knackered old thing that belonged to a friend of my mom’s. And I just got in it, put it into gear, and it went kadunk and I was like, “Oh, this is tough.” I like that about Japanese cars. I’ve missed it with the relative absence of Japanese EVs. Less good stuff. I don’t think it rides well at all. It’s weirdly firm. It’s picking up bumps in this smooth looking road that I am not seeing. Another really unimpressive thing that I’ve picked up in the press pack is the charging speed because it’s quoted at 150 kW which is bang average at best. But it also says 10 to 80% in 45 minutes, which means it must just pop to 150 kW and then drop straight back down again. Now, this really highlights the absolute folly of max charging speeds because they have no real bearing on how quickly cars can actually charge. 150 kW. Well, for how long does it do that speed? Clearly not very long in the case of this one. And and for me, that is just another kind of classic first EV syndrome symptom. We know that it takes a little while to iron out some of the mistakes and get your hardware bang up to speed. That kind of explains to me why they don’t really seem to have exploited the EV platform especially well in terms of affording you extra space inside. Perhaps explains why doesn’t have proper one pedal driving or the bizarrely poor charging performance despite the sort of semideent max charging speed. On the whole as a car it’s probably a B minus. But to be honest with you, I like it more than that. I like it more than I should. Maybe I think I’ve just been very taken by the Suzuki brand and their very different approach to going about their business. This is my first Suzuki launch and I’ve learned a lot today. This is a brand who occupies one 2% market share in the UK and is happy with that. They’re not trying to be the big dog. like having a smalish customer base who are fiercely loyal and that gives them the ability to go about things a little bit differently. I like the fact that all their cars are offered with four-wheel drive. It’s an immediate point of differentiation. And in a world where everything is dressed up as a crossover SUV, but can’t actually do anything at all when faced with a patch of mud, it goes a long way in my book that these cars can. I like the emphasis they put on customer satisfaction. They have a fiercely loyal customer base and it’s easy to see why because they put a great deal of emphasis on the quality of their dealerships. They’ve talked a lot today about how hard they’re working to train their dealers so that they are competent when explaining this new electric car to potential customers, ensuring that they have all the facts before they make a purchase decision and if they buy one, they drive off knowing what it’s going to be like living with an electric car. Not a lot of brands are doing that. In short, is this car going to change the world? Most certainly not. It is by no metric a groundbreaking electric vehicle. But is it going to make going electric very straightforward for Suzuki customers who want to stay with Suzuki? Yeah. And by that probably the most important metric. I think it’s a success. I think I’m finding it hard to be too critical of this car because more than anything else, I’m just so happy to note that the Japanese auto industry as a whole, Suzuki included, seems to finally be really getting stuck into electric vehicles. They seem to finally appreciate that yes, this is the future and we need to give it a proper go. The EV landscape has been deprived of really top-notch Japanese cars thus far. And that’s a huge miss because at their brilliant best, they are wonderful and completely distinct from what we make in Europe. Completely different from what we get out of Korea and China. If you look at what’s coming in the next 12 months from Honda, Mazda, if you look at what’s just arrived from Nissan, if you look at Suzuki’s plans, three more electric cars in the next couple of years, this is the moment that Japan really gets stuck into electric vehicles. And that is good news for everyone. So, there we go. The Suzuki Evitara by no means a gamecher, but a very positive sign that things are moving in a very good direction. Do let me know what you think in the comments. Do make sure to like and subscribe if you haven’t already. And if you have been, thanks for watching.
Jack puts Suzuki’s first EV to the test on and off road to find out whether it’s any good. Entering late to the party and entering a congested market, does this little SUV do enough to stand out?
00:00 introduction
1:34 Meet the Vitara
2:52 Platform and specs
5:57 A boot grumble
6:44 Offroading!
8:09 Mixed bag interior
12:24 back seat Jack test
13:30 Driving impressions
16:41 The verdict
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