Car Gazing
Grand Vitara attempts the impossible
Small Suzuki SUV tries to perform well on- and off-road
By Derek Price
Let's get something straight.
True off-road ability and roadgoing comfort can never, ever, under any circumstances be combined.
There's always a tradeoff of some sort. You can design a vehicle strong enough to travel across Austrailia without touching pavement, or you can create a car that's deliciously smooth and silent on the highway.
But you can't make one vehicle that does both things perfectly.
That would be like trying to combine Mozart with Ludacris, Rush Limbaugh with Michael Moore, or Paris Hilton with Pat Robertson. It simply wouldn't work.
But that doesn't stop Suzuki from trying.
The Grand Vitara, a small SUV that has attributes of both a truck and a car, attempts to bridge the chasm between off-road performance and on-road comfort. It falls about halfway in between the brutish, rock-climbing prowess of a Jeep Wrangler and the silky confines of a Lexus RX, as contradictory as that may seem.
In reality, the Grand Vitara is a 4x4 that isn't bad to drive. It's light-eons ahead of the Wrangler in terms of comfort, but it's also not nearly as rewarding to drive as other car-based baby SUVs like the Honda CRV, Ford Escape and Toyota RAV4.
It's not underpowered. The 185-horsepower V6 feels almost like a V7, if such a thing existed, with the kind of crazy, torquey, low-end power you normally expect from a raucous V8. It's just the right kind of power for off-road driving, but it's also quiet enough to feel at home in the city.
It doesn't have a cramped, truckish cabin, either. Both the front and back seats are roomy and easy to climb in and out of, and the interior fit and finish is much more like a family sedan than an off-road vehicle.
But the Grand Vitara is an off-road vehicle, and that's why the driving feel isn't so impressive.
All the sensory feedback you get from this SUV tells you it's heavy, from the grabby brakes to the meaty steering to the wallop you get in your backside when you hit a bump. It feels very much like driving through a bowl of cold, sticky oatmeal.
If you really do off-road driving, this shouldn't bother you a bit. It might even feel downright sumptuous compared to other off-roaders like the Nissan Xterra or the big and expensive Hummer H2. If you mainly want to drive on roads, though, you'd probably be happier with one of the many car-based SUVs and crossovers available.
Other than the heavy driving feel, there aren't many downsides to the Grand Vitara. It starts under $20,000 so it hits the sweet spot of the market, and it comes with a great warranty and plenty of standard equipment, including air conditioning, power everything, cruise control and an MP3 CD stereo on the base model.
But combining comfort and off-road ability at the same time?
Nope. It merely finds the happy medium.
(Derek Price is a newspaper editor and freelance writer living in Texas.)
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