Two Months in a Suzuki Jimny: My Review

Happy New Year! Thorsten and I recently returned to Joburg after an incredible 10-day road trip through Limpopo province. I have many stories to tell about that trip, but before I get into that I want to write a quick review of my first two months driving Greylene, my new Suzuki Jimny.

I’ll preface this review by repeating that I am not a car person. If you’re looking for details about a Suzuki Jimny’s engine cylinders or towing capacity or fuel efficiency or whatever else car people care about, this post is not for you. I’m here to tell you what I like and dislike about this car (spoiler: the dislikes are very few), as a regular person who uses a car to get places.

For your information: Greylene is a manual 2022 Suzuki Jimny GLX, which has a few more extras – including nicer trim and a big navigation screen with Apple CarPlay, which I love – than the more basic Jimny GL. If you’re looking for an automatic Jimny, they seem to cost about R20k more on average and are quite difficult to find. I bought Greylene second-hand from the Suzuki dealership in Bryanston, Johannesburg; she had 25,000 kilometers (15,500 miles) at the time of purchase. I paid around R370k (about $20k), which I think is an incredibly good price for a car that does so much.

Here is a brief list of my Jimny pros and cons.

Driving a Suzuki Jimny: The Pros

I love many, many things about this car, but here are the highlights:

1) The Cuteness (and Smallness) Factor

Thorsten calls Greylene “the puppy car”. And, awwwwwwww, isn’t she just the cutest little 4x4 you’ve ever seen? She’s pretty and petite, with a minute turning radius and the ability to fit into any parking spot (or low-ceilinged parking garage) that a regular car fits into. Her design is pleasing to the eye and she’s not intimidating in any way. Greylene also looks great in pictures.

2) The Fun Factor

Driving Greylene is fun. Before buying her I read some critiques that Jimnys aren’t fast, but I personally find her quite zippy – at least compared to the tiny Hyundai Atos that I drove before. She drives comfortably at 120km/hour, and I can easily pass slow cars on the highway at over 130km/hour. I haven’t experienced a single moment in which I don’t love driving this car.

3) The Mobility Factor

The Suzuki Jimny is a 4x4 and and despite its diminutive stature, it can drive anywhere. If you’ve driven around South Africa at all, you know there are a lot of dirt and gravel roads – roads that, while possibly passable in a 2x4, are much more comfortable and less stressful in a 4x4 with high clearance. We drove on many such roads in Limpopo, for hundreds of kilometers, and Greylene handled all of them with ease. I can’t overstate what a great feeling it is to know that not a single place in this vast, beautiful country is off-limits to me anymore.

On a related note: I’d like to give a quick shout-out to the Suzuki AutoClub of South Africa, which hosts wonderful, affordable 4x4 training courses for Suzuki owners. Thorsten and I did one of these trainings at the De Wildt 4x4 Park in Magaliesburg recently and we both learned so much. While totally terrified of the super steep obstacles we had to drive, I was equally impressed by Greylene’s ability to handle literally any terrain.

I also love being higher up off the road when driving in Joburg, especially as the city’s potholes proliferate like mushrooms and grow wider and deeper by the day. And Greylene’s high clearance comes in super handy during the summer rainy season, when storm drains clog and cause sudden, lake-sized puddles to spread across the city streets.

4) The Comfort Factor

With the exception of a couple of minor issues (see below), I find the Jimny to be an extremely comfortable car. Note, again, that I am used to driving small, economical cars, so you might feel differently if you’re used to driving a Range Rover or BMW. But Greylene is every bit as comfortable as any Jeep, Land Rover, or Landcruiser I’ve ever ridden in. Thorsten, who is 6'2’’, has plenty of leg room in the front seats. The back seats aren’t bad either, considering how small the car is.

Some people also complain that Jimnys sway when moving at high speeds due to their boxy, upright design. Thorsten said he’s felt that once or twice but I really haven’t, even when driving in storms. I feel very safe driving Greylene.

Driving a Suzuki Jimny: The Cons

As I already mentioned, there are way fewer cons than pros.

1) The Space Factor

I love small, easy-to-drive cars, so the Jimny’s size is mostly a pro for me. But the con is that when the Jimny’s back seats are open, there is no storage space. Like literally, you can hardly fit a large purse or grocery bag in the space behind the back seats. And you wouldn’t want to anyway, because anything squeezed back there will fall right out as soon as you open the rear tail gate.

So basically the Jimny has space for two people and a lot of stuff, or three/four people – five, if you really squeeze – and very little stuff. Luckily the seats are easy to fold up and down and the car fits a ton of gear when the seats are folded down flat.

On a related note, the Jimny’s back seat windows don’t open, and as a fan of air circulation I don’t like that. To remedy this problem, in the future I hope to install these little sliding rear windows from Jimny Wild.

2) The Crappy Air Vent and Cup-holder Factor

As previously mentioned, I am a fan of air circulation. Therefore it dismays me that the Jimny has the stupidest, flimsiest air vents I’ve ever seen in a car. I won’t post a photo because it’s hard to convey how dumb the air vents are without experiencing them in real life. I’ll just say that the vents are hard to manipulate and they break easily. If anyone from Suzuki is reading this, please explain to me what the deal is with these vents and please, please fix them for the comfort and wellbeing of all future Jimny owners.

The Jimny also has two very shallow, hard-to-reach cup-holders that are more or less useless. Accessory companies like Jimny Wild offer work-around cup-holders that you can install in front of the crappy air vents, and I’ve purchased one of those, but I’m still not super happy with that arrangement because the cup gets in the way of my precious air. Please fix this too, Suzuki! Modern humans need a decent place to store their coffee cups and water bottles.

Other than some other really minor quirks that aren’t significant enough to point out, these are my only cons.

Problematic air vents and cup-holders aside, I love this car more than any other car I’ve ever owned and driving it makes me so happy. Thorsten loves it too, and we both enthusiastically recommend the Jimny to everyone we meet. Buying Greylene was by far my best decision of 2023.

Check back later this week for the first of a few stories about our Limpopo adventures in Greylene.