Anyone would be sceptical about the Super Carry’s remarkably small 0.8L two-cylinder diesel, even with its output boosted to 32hp / 75Nm by an inter-cooled turbocharger. As compact as it is, the Suzuki micro-truck can still weigh 1600kg when loaded. That’s over a ton and half that needs pushing. Is a 32hp diesel really enough of a powerplant? We we’re sceptical too, but that was before we took her down the Tagaytay-Talisay road with a six passenger loadout … and brought her back up again. Repeat: brought her back up again.
The Tagaytay-Talisay road brings vehicles from mountain down to lakeside in just 15 minutes, that’s how severe its grades are, and it offers the option of not having to go back up and through Tagaytay to get back to Manila. There’s the option of going through Talisay and on through to the Star tollway for a flat return trip. That flatlands fallback wasn’t necessary, though, not on the surprising Super Carry.
With a diesel’s long stroke leverage, the small engine’s torque was always there, pushing the Super Carry with a six-passenger half-load. There were inevitable stints in first gear, speed topping out at 20km/h whenever steep grades robbed us of momentum, but the Super Carry would climb relentlessly, bringing us back to Tagaytay’s altitude with just a few minutes more than it would have taken a sedan with a perky powerplant.
And, while heading back north to Manila, the Super Carry showed that its dinky diesel is powerful enough to merit holding back on the flats. The micro-truck’s accelerator pedal is a drive-by-wire affair with a built-in speed governor. Although stomping on the pedal in either 4th or 5th gear brings healthy acceleration that feels like it could bring you to 90 or 100km/h, respectively, the speed governor steps in to close the throttle back up to maintain a 86~88km/h maximum (actually 80km/h as monitored by GPS tracking).
Clearly, the Super Carry’s small turbodiesel is powerful enough to take Tagaytay from Talisay (even Baguio through Kennon, for that matter) and to merit speed-governing for the sake of safety and of efficiency (magic words in fleet managers’ ears). If not for anything else, the speed governor that’s backhanded proof of the small diesel’s sufficiency also brings cruise-control convenience: step on the pedal as hard as you like, the throttle will still open up just enough to maintain a max-conserve and radar-safe speed of 80km/h.
You can start by rolling her out like a diesel. Put her in gear and, with your foot off the gas, slowly let off the clutch pedal (letting the clutch plate ease onto the pressure plate) until you feel that initial bite. That’s when you press on the gas and further ease off the clutch pedal at the same time. The engine that can be quick to rev otherwise will then have all its revolutions pushing the sedan forward before you step on the gas in earnest, thus keeping revs down to under 1500rpm.
Then after, even still with just 1500rpm, the impulse to short-shift to save fuel in crawling city traffic is easy to give into. Topping out at 1500rpm, I could shift to second gear at 10, then to third at 25, then fourth at 40 and then finally to overdrive 5th gear at 50 km/h. And all these even with a full passenger load. The result was a quiet drive (onset of throatiness happens at 2000rpm) and fuel savings on city sorties that can impact the entire nation’s bottom-line.
Introduced late in 2015, the new Celerio turns the badge into a plus-sized A-segment hatchback with uncompromised seating for five adults and a weekender’s worth of luggage space with its best-in-class 254-liter cargo compartment. It’s now longer by 10cm with a proportionate lengthening of the wheelbase by 9cm, and it boasts of better headroom with a height increase of 7cm.
Supple enough for both comfort and for keeping all four wheels planted, the suspension feels robust enough, the ground clearance sensible enough, for confidently taking on those occasional softroad challenges. And the wheels mount sedan-sized 165/65 R14’s—good feet under a light sub-compact, good enough but also shrouded by roomy fenders that can take wider rubber if you feel like tweaking those tires.
On the automatic gearbox variant, the powertrain is completed with a two-range JATCO CVT7, the same continuously variable transmission used on the Mitsubishi Mirage CVT variant. The CVT7 adds an auxiliary gearbox between the CVT’s pulleys and the shaft to turn the drive wheels. With this auxiliary gearbox and its low and standard gear ratios, the pulleys meant to have continuously varying diameters are kept compact while still delivering a generously wide range of gear ratios starting with a deep bottom ratio of 1:4.07 in the low range, and going up to an exceptionally tall overdrive ratio of 1:0.55 in the standard range.
As on most automatic gearboxes, conventional or CVT, the Celerio’s JATCO CVT7 uses a hydraulic torque converter to connect engine to transmission. Torque converters both tolerate and exploit slippage—tolerated because it’s a physical fact, there being slippage when you’re pumping fluid from an impeller to a rotor to transmit torque, and exploited because that slippage causes gear reduction that in turn multiplies torque. And that slippage is eventually eliminated with a lock-up clutch that creates hard contact between the torque converter’s pumping elements. Lock up happens late in the cycle, particularly on conventional automatic gearboxes, kicking in when the vehicle has reached cruise, after shifting all the way up to top gear.
The Celerio’s JATCO solution is elegant: since the torque converter feeds into a continuously variable system (no distinct gears, no shift shock), the CVT7 gearbox triggers the lock-up clutch early on, as early as during roll out, in fact. To bring it into play, use this Rule of Twos as described in our related story, 
Go gentle on the throttle for those crucial seconds on roll out and you’ll be able to step on the gas however you like afterwards, and this while being treated to the Celerio’s surreal alter ego. With an engine that offers rich torque early on, that’s quiet until you want it to be otherwise, and with no slippage in the system to induce the dreaded rubber-band effect, this gamed Celerio will make you think Suzuki had somehow added an electromotor under the hood … she’ll be that zippy, and quiet.
The wheels are pushed to the corners of a trunkless body with very little overhang, the Swift’s length dominated by that long 2.43m wheelbase. What overhang lingers is mostly in front where the extraneous weight is pushed into turns by the steered wheels, not trailing behind the rear wheels where centrifugal force would act on it more and possibly cause lift-off oversteer. At close to 70 percent of its wheelbase, the Swift’s width puts the wheels on wide tracks, splayed out well to keep her grippy and upright through those fast turns.
Other than its left-hand drive configuration, the Swift 1.2L here matches India specs so closely, it even features the same ground clearance—raised from the 1.4L’s 140mm up to the Indian 1.2L’s 170mm. (Clearances of 160mm or more are typical in India where roads could be much rougher than those we have here.)
But on the Swift 1.2L AT, the automatic gearbox is so well tuned to that smaller engine, the slightly lower torque seems well compensated for by proportionate, well matched slippage in the transmission’s hydraulic torque converter. Slippage happens when the impeller driven by the engine’s flywheel rotates faster than the turbine that it pumps hydraulic fluid to, the turbine which in turn drives the transmission. That slippage may seem inefficient but it actually multiplies torque (and is not the cause of an AT’s pumping losses, not in itself). Think of it as dynamic gear reduction that self-adjusts as the turbine and impeller eventually match rotation rates. On the Swift 1.2L AT, that slippage is working the whole time you’re accelerating, becoming more apparent whenever you stomp on the gas.
With the engine at idle, the Swift 1.2L eagerly rolls out as soon as you let off the brake. Slowly increasing throttle then will bring assertive acceleration at around 2250rpm, eventually bringing you to a cruise with shift points at 20, 50 and 80km/h. Settle down at 80km/h and clutch lock-up will soon kick in, that hydraulic action between impeller and turbine being replaced with this hard physical contact that then eliminates slippage. You can then ease off the gas to maintain cruise with 2000rpm—note that 250rpm increment from the 2250rpm you were using with hydraulic conversion still going on.
Go faster and you’ll notice revs going relatively high, the 1.2L’s need for more gear reduction becoming obvious. But the engine’s variable valve timing (VVT) valvetrain seems to compensate well, making the fuel mix lean enough to deliver impressive consumption numbers of 16km/l while cruising at 100km/h with 2500rpm, 19km/l at 90km/h with 2250rpm, and 20km/l at 80km/h with 2000rpm.
But the reduction in aerodynamic down-force seems marginal enough not to erode the Swift’s ground-hugging weight. In fact, the slight reduction in down-force, making the Swift somewhat lighter at high speed, seems to contribute to its impressive fuel economy
A total of 27 representatives from the leading names in the banking industry road tested the Ciaz which boasts of best-in-class fuel efficiency, a sporty yet elegant exterior design, and other advanced features.
Suzuki Celerio CVT emerged to have the best gasoline-powered engine after achieving 29.14km/L in the run which stretched from Angeles, Pampanga through the Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway (SCTEX) and Tarlac-Pangasinan-La Union Expressway (TPLEX) and back. Aside from the Celerio, the all-new Ciaz Manual Transmission (M/T) likewise topped the fuel-efficiency test in the gasoline sedan category, clocking in at 27.94km/L. Other Suzuki vehicles also participated in the exercise, including Celerio M/T (27.70), Ciaz GLX A/T (22.93km/L), Swift 1.2 (22.35km/L), and Ertiga GLX A/T (22.03km/L).