Five door Jimny, auto or manual?

lightning wrote:

Looking to buy a five door Jimny for my business. Mainly because 

a/our 2020 three door has been totally reliable 
b/l want to get out of diesel vehicles 
c/l like driving the three door but it's too small for my business use.

There's a few places offering imports and prices have come down.

My only question is, auto or manual? l've never driven the auto but l had a Defender and got used to not having to change gear.

l know there are people on here who drive the new Jimny auto. 

ls it smooth, fast enough, nice to drive? l am not bothered that it's slower than the manual, so long as it's good enough. As my day is spent driving between customers in the city.

Do the rear seats fold flat to the floor? 

ls it okay on the motorway? As in, can keep to 70mph without changing down all the time.

I can't get a test drive so will have to choose "blind" and from recommendations on here.

If it was 1996, then a 4 speed auto might be ok. But in 2026 it has to be a major downer really. Even more so when coupled to a wheezy 1.5 litre engine.

I think the only way you'll know for sure is to drive one, but the performance must be glacial. I bet you'll struggle to beat some lorries away from a round about. Esp if you actually use the seats or load it up.

70mph cruising, well you know how 3 door manual does here. I thought mine was fine, although it was happier at more like 60-65mph. The 5 door is heavier and an auto has a worse final drive, so I would expect it to be slightly worse if you truly want to cruise at a real 70mph+

I actually like the idea of the 5 door, but the execution I feel is lacking. Its heavier, but has the same power, so in real world it has less power to weight. It still uses an antique gearbox. And it has the same size wheels, so off road performance is massively compromised with far worse breakover angle. The 3 door liked to drag its belly (transfer case and radius arm mounts) on the ground enough. The 5 door must be truly terrible on any sort of undulating off road terrain in this regard.

I suppose the other way to look at it. Apart from counting the number of doors, the 5 door appears to everything the the 3 door does but worse.

Some good info in this review:

Plus highlights a bit of a handling flaw, skip to 14min 10 sec to see what I mean.

300bhpton wrote:

I actually like the idea of the 5 door, but the execution I feel is lacking. Its heavier, but has the same power, so in real world it has less power to weight. It still uses an antique gearbox. And it has the same size wheels, so off road performance is massively compromised with far worse breakover angle.

This was one of my concerns, in fact the second most important (the first was how much luggage I could get in the boot without folding the rear seats).

It's not as bad as it would appear on paper, and in fact, the first thought in my mind, literally within the first thirty seconds behind the wheel, was "hey, this is not bad!!"

Test drive was a Wednesday, down payment was the following Monday and I drove it home on the Friday - two years later I have very few regrets.

Question for you - when you say the automatic has a worse "final drive", what are you referring to?  The ring & pinion ratio or the overall gearing?  If you look at the ring & pinion ratio, yes, the automatic is a 4.3:1 compared to the manuals 4.1:1, but, factor in the transmission & transfer case ratios and the differences are insignificant.

In my experience, pulling away from a standstill, it's no slouch, that said, overtaking at a reasonable speed is a different thing, you pretty much have to floor the throttle to force a kick down to third, yes, a larger engine, say a 2.0 (which is what I was driving before) would have been nice, but the truth is I rarely miss it.

Antique gearbox? Nah sorry. 6 speed plus automatic boxes are really only useful for bragging rights and keeping a diesel in its power band. On something that can rev past 3750 rpm it's really hard to justify all those extra gears are superfluous. Add in having a torque converter instead of a robotic clutch system and 4 is fine. And also don't conflate a modern computer controlled automatic with a torqueflite out of a range rover they are not the same.