Introducing the Suzuki Swace: A Value Offering in the Toyota Family
Dimples – those of the “aww, isn’t he cute, Granny” variety – may be the easiest way to tell a Swace from the Toyota it’s related to. The Suzuki has little cut-outs at the lateral extremes of the front bumper that look like they should route cooling air to the brakes, but are actually just styling affectations; the Corolla doesn’t.
There are other ways. Suzuki’s decided to pitch its car – which launched in 2020, was updated for the 2023 model year, and then had a few more equipment revisions midway through 2024 – at the lower end of the wider Corolla’s model range as a value offering. So you can have the Swace with only wee-looking 16in alloy wheels, and the 1.8-litre hybrid powertrain (the Corolla can be had with a more powerful 2.0-litre full hybrid).
And then there’s the fact that it says ‘Swace’ on one side of the bootlid, and comes with Suzuki badges for no extra cost, though you can bet Toyota’s UK supplier base makes for the car rather than them being shipped in from Nagano, Japan.
An update for the Swace’s hybrid powertrain was the main driver of the car’s 2023 revision. A lighter battery and a more potent electric motor caused power to jump from 118- to 138bhp, and torque to rise by a similar amount.
That brought 0-62mph sprint potential down below the 10sec barrier. But perhaps more importantly, it also extended the car’s capacity for electric-only running – or how often and for how long the petrol engine can shut down while maintaining decent urban performance and drivability.
This isn’t a plug-in hybrid; so its 200v, 3.6Ah battery will likely only propel it for around a mile at most. But, in rapidly and frequently cycling energy and giving the combustion engine a chance to shut down perhaps little but often, it works its way to a WLTP Combined lab test fuel economy rating of 62.7mpg.
Like the related Corolla, it’s based on Toyota’s TNGA-C platform, and has all-independent suspension.
