Track and Swace

SEARCH FOR A POSITIVE WITH SUZUKI TWIN FROM TOYOTA

THIS week we have a Suzuki that’s really a Toyota. This hybrid estate car is the second-born child of Suzuki’s recently established relationship with its rival.

The first was the Suzuki Across, which is a rebadged Toyota RAV4. The Swace, as you can probably guess from its proportions, is a Suzukiised Toyota Corolla estate, or to be more accurate, a Corolla Touring Sports.

Suzuki has grafted on a subtle new nose that follows the company’s current styling cues. Bland is my judgment, though no more so than the Corolla’s snout. LED headlamps have been fitted, plus a new rear bumper and tail lights. On the tailgate there’s a Suzuki badge that sits on a plastic plinth. Looks a bit like an amateur’s initial experiments with 3D printing.

Our test car is painted in black, which hardly helps. Perhaps the jazzier Dark Mica Blue or Oxide Bronze Metallic would make the Swace look a little less ordinary. But probably not.

Our car is in SZ5 spec which is the flagship version and sits above the entry-level SZ-T. The latter costs £27,499 and the former £29,299. As you’d expect, the powertrains on offer are straight from Toyota. Make that powertrain singular because Toyota has supplied Suzuki only with the 1.8-litre four-cylinder engine available in the Corolla for which read 120bhp (the

Corolla’s more powerful 2.0-litre unit makes 178bhp by the way). To this are joined a CVT gearbox and 71bhp electric motor.

Step inside the Swace and you’re faced with an identical cabin to the Toyota apart from an S on the steering wheel boss, and in the SZ5, leather upholstery. There’s a USB port in the centre console ahead of the gear selector but that’s not the one through which you can pair your smartphone.

As an aside, when the Corolla was launched, smartphone mirroring via Apple Carplay and Android Auto was not available but the Swace has it as standard.

When I pressed the map button to the side of the infotainment screen the display flashed up a message saying that this function was not supported.

I assumed that Suzuki intends you to navigate via your smartphone and Google Maps or Waze. Trouble was, I couldn’t find another USB port. Eventually this elusive connection was discovered under the dashboard to the right of the glovebox. Once I’d plugged my phone in all was well and music and directions were available.

The Suzuki Swace is the same to drive as its Toyota twin. You have a choice of three driving modes starting with Normal, Eco and Sport.

There’s also an EV mode but you’ll be lucky to catch the Swace with enough juice in its battery to go more than a few blocks. The Sport mode is pointless, not least because this is a car that is best driven smoothly and gently; not just to get better economy, but because there’s no pleasure in trying to hustle it along quickly. The CVT gearbox allows the engine’s revs to whoop up and down and it becomes a lot more irritating than enjoyable.

Naturally the Swace has exactly the same dimensions as the Corolla estate, which means a boot space of 596 litres with the rear seats in place and 1,606 litres with them folded flat. It’s a very useful space which easily swallowed my road bike.

Thanks to its tie-up with Toyota, Suzuki has very easily added a family estate car to its catalogue. Good economic sense no doubt, but it’s a shame Suzuki has added a rather bland car to what, with the excellent Swift and even more appealing Ignis, is a really interesting line-up of cars.

Not that the Swace is a bad car, but for a like-for-like family car I’d look first at a Skoda Octavia (perhaps in new PHEV guise) or the recently revealed Golf estate.