Suzuki Swift 2021

Swift’s stylishly upright squareness and wide-opening doors pay entry/egress dividends, big time. Most people can simply climb in and out, as per most compact SUVs. Easy.

Once sat ahead of a beautifully sparse dashboard, you’ll also appreciate the excellent forward vision that the near-upright pillars offer, as well as the generous headroom and vast degree of adjustability offered by the driver’s seat and tilt/telescopic steering column.

The centre console is dominated by Suzuki’s ever-present touchscreen featuring a colourful and logical quadrant of audio, telephony, sat-nav and vehicle-settings functions.

Beneath that, the single-zone climate control system brings effective cooling, heating and de-misting as required, though the fan adjustment isn’t intuitively sited where you may expect it to be.

The Swift may be style-savvy, but Suzuki’s thought of everything when it comes to packaging, with heaps of storage up front, including a small but useful glovebox size, decent bottle slots in the doors and room for bits and pieces in the lower-console area.

The same more or less applies out back too, though the faddish pillar-mounted door handles might be beyond the reach of smaller arms. Again, wide doors and a tall ceiling allow for easy entry, and once there, the amount of space is actually startling if you’re coming in from other superminis. Even long-legged riders can sit without their knees touching the front seats, with the added bonus of there being room for big feet under them. That’s something you could never say about older Swifts.

Some people may find the propensity of black plastic to be a bit cheap-looking, but the fact is that everything is extremely well screwed together, with no squeaks or rattles.

Further back, the luggage area is deep but not very long, offering up an adequate 242L, though of course the split/fold rear backrests do fold forward to extend that up to 556L. However, the resulting floor area is also stepped.