Cars.com's Mike Hanley walks you through the 2008 Suzuki SX4 Sport. It competes with the Ford Focus and the Honda Civic.
Transcript
Hi, I'm Mike Hanley with Cars.com and this is the Suzuki SX4 Sedan. It's a new compact sedan from Suzuki and I'm gonna detail some of its unique styling elements and performance capabilities today.
One of the SX4 Sport's unique styling elements is it's tall roof. It's 60.8 inches tall, which makes it taller than a Ford Focus or a Honda Civic. The SX4 Sport has standard 17 inch alloy wheels, a lot of cars in this segment don't have that, and they wear low-profile tires and are connected to a suspension that features front and rear stabilizer bars. One of the things you notice about the SX4 Sport when sitting in the driver's seat is that its eight pillars are pulled forward. And when you're looking right to check for pedestrians, they can get in the way, even though they have these windows right here. There's lots of headroom. I'm six foot, one inches tall and you can see I have plenty of headroom here. What we would like to see is a height adjustable seat, so you could take advantage of some of that head room if you wanted to get a kind of taller view over the front of the hood, and also a telescoping steering wheel. Standard features in the car include air conditioning, keyless entry, and a CD stereo, which is really nice for a car that starts under $15,000. Most materials in the SX4 are nicely finished, like the dash materials, but there are some elements that show off the car's economy car nature. And those include the fuel and trunk door releases next to the driver's seat. They're really kind of cheaply finished and then also the trunk. The SX4 Sport's trunk is a sizeable 14.3 cubic feet that makes it larger than a Civic's or a Corolla's. One thing we don't like about the trunk though, is that the front wall is made of a flimsy, cardboard-like material. And when one staffer put in a rolling piece of luggage, that's kind of like this one here, into the trunk, it punctured a hole in that wall, now that doesn't bode very well for long-term durability. The SX4 has a 2.0-liter, four-cylinder engine that makes 143 horsepower. And in terms of fuel economy, it doesn't quite match up with a Corolla or Civic or Sentra, but it does get 2,331 MPG with the automatic and 2,230 with the manual. Even though its fuel economy, it's not the best in the class and there are a couple of shoddy elements in the car. The SX4 does offer a lot of features and sportiness for the money. For additional information on this car or any other, go to cars.com and our blog, KickingTires.
