Suzuki Japan Suspends Jimny 5D Orders After 4-Day Demand Creates 3.5 Yr Backlog

fordem wrote:

As a "mild hybrid", it might be feasible, but, given the fact that EU is looking to ban all ICE vehicles by 2030, will the potential sales be worth the investment in engineering time?

 

Sadly I doubt going mild hybrid would be enough to avoid ZEV fines today, the new mild hybrid Swift with 4wd is 110g/km and that doesn't have the aero of a housebrick like the Jimny. It won't be coming back to the UK/EU unless there's a radical change in legislation. 

fordem wrote:

There have been, I believe, numerous discussions on this forum, on why the Jimny as an EV would be impractical, the weight of the batteries to give it any decent range would make it excessively heavy.

As a "mild hybrid", it might be feasible, but, given the fact that EU is looking to ban all ICE vehicles by 2030, will the potential sales be worth the investment in engineering time?

tbh I think an EV Jimny could work well, it would weigh more obviously, but unlikely to be a real world issue with correct suspension tuning. But it would IMO need a suitable range.

I am amazed/staggered Suzuki never bothered to fit their mild hybrid tech to the Jimny. It is only a small battery pack (loads of places to fit on the Jimny) and a fancy alternator. With the right bits I'm sure you could easily retrofit it at home.

fordem wrote:

What I want to know is what are the EU governments doing to ensure that there will be an EV charging infrastructure in place by the time the 2030 ban takes effect.

The power has to be generated somewhere and distributed to the end user somehow.

2030 ICE ban won't happen. Can't see how it will be possible, nobody apart from some deluded politicians think it can happen. Nobody in the industry sees it as possible.

Also I don't personally believe EV's are the future, at least not anytime soon. They just aren't viable for large percentages of the population. There are something like 250 million cars in the EU (assume this excludes the UK which has 35-40 million cars).

Even 20 or 30% of this total is still a huge number of vehicles (84000000 cars). For EV to be truly viable it needs to be capable of meeting 99%+ of the current car owners.

300bhpton wrote:

2030 ICE ban won't happen. Can't see how it will be possible, nobody apart from some deluded politicians think it can happen. Nobody in the industry sees it as possible.

Also I don't personally believe EV's are the future, at least not anytime soon. They just aren't viable for large percentages of the population. There are something like 250 million cars in the EU (assume this excludes the UK which has 35-40 million cars).

Even 20 or 30% of this total is still a huge number of vehicles (84000000 cars). For EV to be truly viable it needs to be capable of meeting 99%+ of the current car owners.
 

Apart from anything else we don't have enough generating capacity for everyone to have an EV, no where near in fact.  There isn't enough for 25-30% of the cars to go EV and we would need to burn more gas (or coal) to meet that demand.

Then there isn't enough power distribution and pylons everywhere are not popular.  We might as well say there aren't enough charge points either and only people who have a drive can safely charge from their house.

Adding clean power generation is not straight forward, nuclear is a viable solution, but don't expect to see any new nuclear power stations by 2030 and even wind farms take a few years to get up an running.

Then there is the elephant in the room which is Trump, he's moving away from clean fuels and most likely EVs (apart from Tesla of course) so what's the point of the ban on ICE when we have people like that?

Other manufacturers have produced hybrids, E.g. LR Defender & Disco, then there is the EV G-Class (from £154k).

Problem is Suzuki won't be interested, if they have a 4 year order book for the petrol Jimny, why bother doing anything else with it?

Don't get me wrong I would like a hybrid vehicle, I might even be persuaded to get an EV, except there aren't any vehicles I like the look of enough to change either of my ICE cars (yet).

 

The main reasons I don't see a clean green ev future is power supply, infrastructure and battery components.
Supply chain issues and availability make building enough batteries next to impossible to build that many new ev's especially in that time frame.
But the average ev at full charge has enough storage to run the average house for 3 days, so if just half the cars on the riad in the UK were suddenly electric that would be the equivalent of.
Currently 34 million cars in the UK
Half of that 17 million.
So the equivalent of about 7 million new houses added to the grid. (That's really rough match but ball park enough for a basic idea)
Now you do the same in Europe ect, can the infrastructure handle that much growth?
In Australia they want to force people to buy plug in EV's so they can act as battery storage because they can't build enough storage any other way, it's probably the same in Europe.
So everywhere you go they will want you to plug your car into the grid, then when you get in it to go, you could have more power or half as much as when you parked.

As I have said before I could buy an ev buggy for the farm and also some other little ev car for not the farm but that would be a huge compromise since I would then have 2 vehicles instead of one because I couldn't use the buggy to go to Asda as it would have to be classed as a tractor and they won't allow that. I then have the next problem with towing capacity and range, yes conceivably the way buggy design is going in a couple of years they might be able to tow as much as a jimny but unless they are made entirely out of battery a buggy towing over a tonne is going to need a recharge when I get to the auction with the sheep never mind going there and back twice in rapid succession. Then I have to contend with security, I wouldn't be able to leave it at the farm unless I parked it in a shipping box inside a 20 foot high razor wire fence charged up directly from the mains and covered by 50 calibre automatic sentry positions 2 feet apart. And even then it's probably only 50 50 it would be there in the morning.

No I think on reflection I would rather stick with my Jimny until petrol is at least as expensive as a Macalan Rare Cask.

And besides, given the current geopolitics we might all yet be walking from our cave to the garden and fighting off the intruders with a stick!

Rabid Rhino wrote:

 
So maybe they're popular ?

 

It depends on how you define popular.  In the home market, i.e. India, the 5-door Jimny is lately a pretty sluggish seller.  It is widely perceived to be too expensive relative to the local competition, and for some time has been subject to price cuts and discount campaigns in an effort to move more units in that country.

Suzuki has wisely decided to ramp up exports of the 5-door, to try to fill some of that excess production capacity, which is why we are now seeing news about Japanese sales.  But that 50k-unit "reservation" surge is not quite as exciting as that CarScoops article implies.  Even if each of those "reservations" turned into a real sale, it represents only about five-and-a-half months of Maruti's Jimny production, if the Jimny 5D line were running full-out... which it has not been, lately.  And that 50k number is just marketing nonsense, frankly, an attempt to make the car more appealing through scarcity; if there were fifty thousand Jimny 5-door cars on the sea headed to Japan right now, you would have an awful lot of nervous Japanese Suzuki dealers chewing their nails.

Could Suzuki sell more of the Jimny if they sold them in every big car market?  Oh sure, definitely.  Would the profit from that cover the huge overhead cost?  Clearly Suzuki doesn't think so.

We all love our Jimnys, and it would be great to see more of them out and about.  But Suzuki is in the business of making money.  "Build more Jimnys and you will make more money" is not really how it works.

And (getting really controversial here) if you set aside the emissions question, the Jimny is still not terribly competitive here in Europe.  A 5-door Jimny would be cross-shopped against the Dacia Duster, which is nearly as capable offroad, has better safety ratings, and is much less expensive.  The 3-door Jimny had the argument of Japanese quality, plus of course the Jimny's charming and unique retro look, but the 5-door comes from (how to say this nicely?) a country that does not typically export to premium markets, and its concessions to practicality lose some of the kawai factor of the little 'un.  In my view, Suzuki is not competing hard in Europe because it is not really competitive in Europe, except for the small niche of savvy drivers like us.