Business Maverick

BUSINESS MAVERICK 168

A zoom with a view: Driving the Suzuki S-Presso

A zoom with a view: Driving the Suzuki S-Presso
The Suzuki S Presso.Photo:Supplied

It has its issues, but SA’s cheapest car is also a kind of brilliant motoring sorcery. If you boil down modern motoring to its most basic constituent parts, you get the S-Presso, the most democratised, blue-collar version of the idea of the car.

First appeared in Daily Maverick 168

As South Africa drifts towards self-inflicted smallness, so the car market will follow. Not long ago, the middle classes were Corolla people, Golf people, Jetta and Camry-driving folks, people for whom the motor industry catered for by producing spacious, sensible and reasonably priced sedan cars.

People don’t really buy that kind of car any more because the middle class has shrunk and there is now a preference for SUVs and crossovers. The result is that you can buy neither a Camry nor a Jetta any more, and the Corolla is outsold severalfold by the RAV, just as the Volkswagen Golf is outsold by the Tiguan. The rich are still here, buying their Porsches and their Range Rovers but, for most people, the market trend over the past decade has been to descend the automotive food chain in step with the rand’s decline and, for many, into an automotive segment that used not to exist.

For years, entry-level motoring in South Africa meant driving cars like the Toyota Tazz or CitiGolf, solid previous-generation developed world cars constructed with amortised tooling at a good price for the local market. As much as they were old-tech, they were quality cars when they were designed and they remained good afterwards. This continues today in the shape of the Volkswagen Polo Vivo and Toyota Corolla Quest. They’re both good, locally built cars at great prices, and the Vivo especially continues to sell faster than tickets to the Magashule trial.

As the buying power of the South African motorist has diminished, manufacturers have begun to import cheaper cars designed for India and other developing countries, such as the Toyota Starlet, Honda Amaze and Ford Figo. These are generally simple machines, operating small naturally aspirated petrol engines with manual gearboxes, and fitted with limited safety features and few electronic gizmos.

Now, however, there’s an even cheaper segment, populated by cars such as the Datsun Go (R177,000), Hyundai Atos (R166,000), Renault Kwid (R157,000) and, more recently, the cheapest new car you can buy in South Africa, the Suzuki S-Presso (R146,000).

When the Go was launched in 2014, it shook things up by coming in at under R100,000, which goes to illustrate the extent of new car price inflation and just how cheap these things are.

So, what’s life like at the very bottom of the market? It’s important to understand the competition. Of course, in strict comparative terms, the Kwid and the Go are the S-Presso’s immediate competitors, but the cheapest car in South Africa competes both in the used car space, where R145,000 will get you a five-year-old Corolla or a three-year-old Ford Fiesta, and with public transport.

If your choice is between these three, for the very price-sensitive buyer, it’s a trade-off between being stabbed by thieves on a burning train, getting to work in a Ses’fikile driven by a psychopath, owning an older, less fuel-efficient car with no warranty, or being in a brand-new, Pep-store runaround with a two-year service plan and a five-year warranty. Sales figures seem to suggest that the latter is a choice people are making. In October, Datsun sold 204 Go and Go+s. Renault sold 606 Kwids and Suzuki sold 406 S-Pressos.

For context, Volkswagen sold 2,259 Polo Vivos in the same month, the country’s best-selling car, which goes to show that this segment has quickly gained relevance in our market.

The S-Presso is at once awful and brilliant. It’s tiny, and the limitation of the adjust for rake makes a large man like me look like Postman Pat after a few too many pies. I feel faintly ridiculous in this thing.

The Suzuki S-Presso dashboard. Photo: Supplied

Then there are the inevitable issues with basic motoring: manual mirrors, manual windows in the back, no boot lid release without the key – that kind of thing.

Safety is also a problem. It’s got four three-point seatbelts, with the fifth being a lap belt in the middle of the rear, a deal-killer for anyone with three kids. It comes standard with ABS and brake force distribution, as well as two airbags up front – all excellent standard kit at the price.

But the body rigidity is poor and the S-Presso last week received a very poor zero-star rating from Global NCAP for occupant protection.

Like its competitors, then, this is not a car to get into a prang with, but it is still, as the statistics will bear out, safer than being crammed into the back of a HiAce.

Then there’s the handling, which can be a little bit alarming. The combination of 180mm ride height (to make it a crossover), skinny little wheels and its slab-sided design can make it feel top heavy. Then there’s the engine, a little 1-litre, three-cylinder affair good for just 50kW.

But, hang on a second. Complaining about this stuff is to miss the point. This is South Africa’s cheapest car, which is why it’s also brilliant. How on earth did they do this? How did they build an entire functioning new car with remote central locking, a trip computer, park distance control, air conditioning, two airbags and ABS and EBD, ship it all the way from India to South Africa, pay the import duties and the taxes and the scandalous costs at the ports and the buggered-up railways, build in a healthy margin for the dealers and then deliver it to somebody 600km inland for R146,000? That’s not business, it’s sorcery.

The S-Presso is like a puppy. It has a zest for life. The gearbox is snick-snick slick and the clutch is excellent. Steering it is more like semaphore than driving; a great deal of sawing at the wheel has very little impact in the direction of the car but, my God, does it keep you awake. 

Also, 50kW might not be a lot but when the car weighs – seriously – just 750kg or so, then it’s positively sparkling up to about 80km/h, when aerodynamics start to happen. That weight also makes it very cheap to run, averaging around 5 litre/100km in my care, which is useful because its fuel tank contains just 27 litres – not much more than a heavy night at the pub for some of us.

It is fairly terrifying in a crosswind, but driving the S-Presso into Cape Town the other day with a howling southeaster behind me, I dropped to third, nailed the throttle and, like a mosquito caught in a hurricane, I blasted up Hospital Bend past all the X5s and the E-Classes and the other two-and-a-half-ton behemoths, grinning from ear to ear.

I loved the sense of proximity to engineering, the transmission whine, the chattering of the clutch, the syncopated thrum of a wobbly little three-cylinder, the sheer stripped-back, basic honesty of the idea of the car-redux.

If you boil down modern motoring to its most basic constituent parts, you get the S-Presso, the most democratised, blue-collar version of the idea of the car. As a motoring enthusiast, I am obliged to love the S-Presso. Is it a good car? What, compared to a Mercedes-Benz? No, of course not, but it is a car – a new car – and that makes it a life-changing and wonderful thing. DM168

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