Grand Entertainment
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- The Suzuki Grand Vitara always had substance and now it also has style
By Nick Syn
WHAT SELLS THESE days? Obviously, if there’s even a hint of cloud on the economic horizon you’ll be more on the lookout for bargains than frills. In the current climate, cheap is unabashedly king. And in car terms, this means you’ve got to go Oriental in order to stand a chance of enjoying a bargain that comes with extra bits that are nice to have but that you can probably do without.
The car buying landscape has changed a fair bit though, new-old player Fiat now has cars that compete at more or less the same price level as some of the more established Japanese marques, offering a welcome dose of Continental flair in this segment of the market.
The fact that the Italians are muscling in on their action sort of neatly counterpoints the direction many Japanese marques are currently taking. Suzuki, for example, uprooted a gaggle of its engineers and set them up in Europe in order to give them inspiration enough to develop the distinctly Continentally-flavoured Swift.
If you’ve driven it, you’d know that the degree of care and level of engineering expertise applied to the Swift extends far beneath its pert and contemporary exterior.
As in it not only looks European, it very much feels it too. This aesthetic Euro-centrism seems to have taken firm root as the same could be said of the new Grand Vitara’s gestation.
Suzuki’s latest SUV takes a big leaf out of the Swift’s book in this regard, and it makes the old Grand Vitara look positively clunky and Jurassic in comparison.
New Vitara hasn’t jettisoned the old car’s best bits, however, it still retains its predecessor’s pukka four-wheel drive hardware. And it also sticks with the ladder frame chassis construction that most serious off-roaders swear by. Only now, Suzuki says it’s mated a monocoque to a ladder frame chassis, calling the resulting combo the “Built-in Steel Ladder Frame.”
The argument against ladder frame construction is that it doesn’t lend itself to refinement. Essentially, in ladder frame construction you get a box that is the cabin, perched atop an immensely strong ladder-like structure that serves as a platform for mounting the wheels, engine and other hardware.
The difficulty is in getting these two bits, the cabin structure and the chassis, to function as one dynamically. That’s why most of the so-called soft-roaders out on the market today use conventional sedan car inspired monocoque or unitary body platforms. It’s much easier to optimise suspension and damper settings for a single body that reacts in a singularly predictable manner than it is to do the same for two bodies with different structural properties glued together.
On the other hand, the advantage is strength, the ladder frames themselves can be made to be far more torsionally rigid than a monocoque. And the separate body and ladder frame can actually mitigate damage due to stress from extremely uneven loading, like when you find yourself halfway down the side of a rock face with one rear wheel up in the air.
You can actually find it difficult to open the doors of unitary body SUVs in these sorts of situations, such is the degree of body flex imposed by the uneven loading. In addition, the ladder frame also acts as a shield that protects vital components like the engine sump, gearbox and driveshafts, components that would ordinarily be left exposed in SUVs using unitary body construction.
Off-road enthusiasts happily embrace the ladder frame method as it ensures that their cars can take the worst that Bukit Timah Nature Reserve has to offer. The relative lack refinement becomes then a small price to pay, and it’s even smaller with respect to the new Vitara.
For starters, it looks nothing like the old car, excepting for the spare wheel mounted over the rear tailgate. In fact, it looks more like a Swift that’s gone through the “Body For LifeTM” programme. Three or four times over. There are no awkward lines, no clumsy sill extensions, and the styling looks very clean and contemporary. From the front, the bonnet seems to angle towards the nose, giving the front wheel arches a pronouncedly flared effect.
