Faults:

Passenger side intermediate shaft bearing squeak when cold.

Piston slap at cold start.

Typical Suzuki valve seal leak resulting in a blue puff at cold start. Nowadays "high mileage" oil helps with that.

General Comments:

Awesome econo box, highly recommend. Mine was the base model with premium aquamarine color option. Looked so cute after I polished it.

Averaged 39 MPG with my speed-biased driving.

Top speed 100 MPH on a flat road.

I bought slightly wider p175/70/13 tires for it instead of the stock donuts. At the time Walmart had a sale on house Goodyear Viva (not Viva2) tires and they were excellent. Quiet ride, good absorption, fantastic grip. It handled like a go-kart. I'd hit curves at full speed and it would gently oversteer but still steer.. enough said.

K-Mart was still in business back then. I'd load up on supplies and went on many day-long road trips all around the land. Super comfortable deep buckets but stiff suspension, quickly got used to steering around the bumps. It had 4-wheel independent.

Rear windows flip open on this gen. Good ventilation blow-through even without AC. On later ones they are glued in place.

Good Japanese wiring on this gen in contrast to later Canadian models. Mine had aftermarket speaker upgrades and premium cassette player. Still sounded laughably tinny-twangy. It ain't an audiophile's car, road noise is loud.

The piston slap was pretty obvious at cold start, but would dissipate after a proper 5-6 minute warm-up. When I didn't warm it up, it would continue all day long. I even removed the oil pan to inspect the piston skirts and they were undamaged, but all had a ridiculous amount of visible freeplay to the cylinders. I guess that's by design.

I was a fanatic of synth oils and tried Castrol Syntec 5w-50 that was available for cheap at K-mart. That's how I found out about Suzuki valve stem seals. Syntec oil suddenly started soaking the intake and exhaust so bad that it would misfire/stumble and smoke dense blue clouds after sitting overnight. It's a characteristic problem among all Suzuki engines that valve seals only last the duration of warranty. Dealer recommended changing to house Pennzoil non-synthetic and the problem was gone.

Acceleration was neither quick nor lethargic, just normal. With mid-RPM engine torque curve it took off from the lights no problem. Way quicker than a '78 Honda Accord, but slower than my buddy's '97 Corolla.

Manual transaxle was the best of any car I've had before or since. Totally quiet, easy shifting, tight precise rod link. Dealer's mechanic recommended conventional gear oil.

I installed a few upgrades: aerodynamic dual mirrors and the thicker steering wheel off a Metro GSi. The mirrors were mostly for the looks. Large rectangular stock mirror had much better reflection 'coz glass, but heavy. Metro mirrors were smaller with lightweight polished metal plate, so not very useful as mirrors :-/ but they looked much faster.

Steering wheel was also a lot lighter but had a different turn cancel prong which I modified to fit. Wow, major improvement! I installed it and went for a test drive to the store, ended up driving around for hours with the radio on. It literally felt like I installed a power steering upgrade, suddenly it was easy even at crawling speeds. Stock steering had a medium-thin hard plastic ring that was difficult to grasp when doing parking maneuvers, necessitating force-cranking at the spokes. Metro steering had a thick soft ring that was much easier and safer to hold, highly recommend this upgrade.

No problems with this car besides some noises mentioned at the beginning. I had to realise that it's not feasible to sleep in this car on multi-day road trips. The passenger seat folded out flat and was fairly ergonomic to sleep on 1-2 nights. Following year my Chevy Celebrity wagon had a totally flat load floor with room to stretch, soft quiet ride, serious stereo blaster, multitude of compartments, so that's the one I drove to Alaska.

Faults:

The wiring from the air flow meter to the throttle position sensor rubbed through, to cause to car to not run. This was sorted in a couple of days.

General Comments:

This car is a proper street legend, boshing out Saxo VTRs like anything.

From its little 1.3 engine, it produces 100 bhp, which ain't half bad.

Saxo boys, don't even try it on with a Swift GTi, because you will look stupid when it goes flying past you!!!