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Upgraded to the Fronx Turbo AT from my Ciaz diesel: Initial impressions

4th September 2024, 11:23 by Ananth Iyer

The highlight of this car is the 1L turbo. It’s small but with good potential. I will any day pick this over the K12 NA 1.2L simply for its strong mid range.

BHPian G20Rider recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

My family had purchased a Suzuki Fronx (Zeta 1L turbo with the 6 speed AT version) back in mid 2023. I had to wait a long 12 months to actually try it when we visited India for our summer vacation in July 2024. I drove it for around 2000 KM in this month and below are my observations about the car

What I liked

Smart styling. I went from not liking the looks of it in the initial days to quite liking it. The design surely grew on me. I now consider Fronx as one of the better designed compact crossover. In fact it’s actually a hatchback with wide and squat stance with sharp lines. I think it can look hotter if it’s lowered a bit.
Good interior room given the compact size. Can comfortably seat 4 (even 5 thanks to the width) and boot is perfectly usable. Very space efficient.
1L booster jet with which performs well when moderately loaded. Decent NVH for a 3 pot. Sound boomy when revved but vibrations are well contained in higher revs. But not as smooth as the 4 cylinder K12. There is definite vibrations at idle. Performance takes a hit when loaded with 5 adults.
Smooth shifting 6 speed TC. I could really feel the difference when I drove the Fronx back to back with the Nios with its AMT. Unfortunately the gearbox tuning is horrible and paddle shifters are a must on this car (More on this in dislikes section)
Well kitted. 6 airbags, touchscreen with wireless carplay/android auto, 195 section tyres, Suzuki connect etc. And that nice LED headlights with a very well defined spread. The connected LED tail light has grown on me. Makes the car look wider.
Hatch like driving feel. It’s based on a baleno and it drives like a baleno. Not very tall and low centre of gravity means high speed manners are sorted. This could be a con some those looking for an SUV feel. Fact that the car is a hatchback is obvious.

What can be better

Based on Balenos heartect platform which hasn’t done very well in crash tests. While the Fronx does feel well built, I’m not sure how it will perform in crash tests, fingers crossed. I wish it was based on the Global C platform of Vitara.
The infamous seat belt warning chimes without weight sensors in back seat. Seat belts not buckled in an empty rear seat? It goes beep beep beep. And the geniuses at Suzuki combined it with a delay till car reaches certain speeds. That means the car waits till you get out of the parking lot and onto a road before crying out loud about the the unbuckled seat belts . Really drove me crazy in the first few weeks before I made peace with it.
Horrific gearbox calibration for eking out the last possible meter from the every drops. Car always feels it is one gear higher than it is supposed to be. For example, Cruising at 40kmph is done in the 4th gear at a lowly 1100rpm. That’s too low and engine is not producing much power. You can feel the engine lugging and there is no way this can be healthy for the engine over long term. It’s only after 1600rpm that engine starts properly pulling.
While I can understand such a tune on the regular 1.2 NA, this makes no sense on their supposedly more powerful version. It’s very frustrating to have a competent engine and smooth shifting gearbox only to be spoiled by this kind of horrific tune. To make above worse, there are no selectable drive mode. A sports mode would have made a difference. This would have allowed the driver to enjoy the turbo charged engine+TC combo should they choose to. I work around this by using M mode with paddle shifter. This is the first car where I regularly used paddle shifters and also the first car where I wished it had a selectable drive mode. Even the Nios with its humble AMT is tuned better. For someone who loves to keep the engines spinning in its power band this is the single biggest flaw of this car and can be a deal breaker.
General interior design. Not a big fan of the dash design, feels too busy. Cheap looking gear knob and a shifter that is straight line from P-R-D-M. Instead of a shift to side for M. Needs to be precise when moving from P to D else will end up in M.
The start stop system. Its too sensitive and kills the engine even before the car has came to a complete stop, for example when Im crawling without accelerator input waiting to cross a road. Its a nuisance and I always keep it off. Having said that I’m impressed with how smoothly the engine starts up and shuts down. It’s smoother than how my 3 series does it. An average driver may not even notice the engine turning off and on especially during a conversation or with music on.

Why Fronx?

We had a Suzuki Ciaz ZDI+ that was bought new in 2015 after my parents retired and moved back to India (Along with a Chevrolet Beat bought in 2011). It was a brilliant car but a terrible misfit for our requirements.

Ciaz was essentially an awesome mile muncher
Very spacious and comfortable inside especially that brilliant rear seat. Perfect to be chauffeur driven.
Super efficient reliable diesel engine that returned excellent fuel economy, but not the most refined or powerful. Ideal for long distance relaxed cruising.
Huge boot. Again perfect for that long road trip.

But why was it a misfit? Well we have a family strength of six people, but four of them were living away from home. That meant 95% of the time it was just my parents driving and they almost never drives for more than 50kms (prefers to hire a cab instead). That means Ciaz never got its chance to show its strength as a spacious mile muncher. At the same time, due to the sheer length of the car, it was sometimes a pain to negotiate the tiny backroads of Kerala. I knew this beforehand and wanted them to buy an i20 petrol automatic back then as I felt it was fitting for our requirements. But they wanted a sedan(that big car thing) and diesel (was peak of diesel then) and a Ciaz was bought new.

In 2019, mom replaced the Beat with a Hyundai i10 Nios petrol automatic. A compact automatic tall boy really opened my dad’s eye and with that the already low usage of Ciaz came to almost nill. He loved the tall seating and compact dimensions. And thanks to the ever worsening traffic in the already small roads of Kerala, a manual diesel was becoming too tiring to drive. Suffix to say, the Ciaz was very underutilised in its time with us. When we sold him in 2024, it had been driven for just around 32,000km in the 9 years of his life!! In fact the potential buyers had trouble believing this was the real mileage. Car was sold within days of listing in OLX and whoever bought it can enjoy that car for a very long time to come.

Below are some pictures we clicked for the sake of advertisement. It was in great condition with full regular service done in Suzuki.

So now dad wanted an anti Ciaz. A compact automatic petrol tall boy. I was not involved in the decision and I don’t think there was any comparison. Dad has become a Suzuki loyalist owing to the painful service experiences he had to experience with Ford in the 2000s and 2010s vs the excellent service Maruti provided for our M800. One day he stated “Suzuki announced a new model called Fronx and I’m considering buying it”. We already had the i10 and both my parents were retired. From a logical point of view, it made no sense to have two 5 seater cars, in fact it didn’t make much sense to have two cars at all, but they were pretty much decided on having a second car. I put forth a proposal to buy an Suzuki Ertiga/XL6 instead, so that we also have a 7 seater for those full family trips. I knew it was a long shot since my parents consider those as vans and too big to drive around. I showed the measurements on how Ertiga is actually shorter than Ciaz and the price difference between the Fronx and Ertiga is not that big, but that could never remove the stigma of driving a “van” and the proposal was never taken seriously. I still wish we had brought an Ertiga. Anyhow, a Zeta 1L turbo with the 6 speed AT version of Fronx came home in mid 2023. I was happy with the variant choice since it was kitted well with that turbo petrol and a real AT.

Photos and highlights

Wide front with the current trend of having a DRL on top of the headlight. While Im not the biggest fan of this, Suzuki has managed to execute it quite nicely here. And a long DRL on top does help car look wider. And I love how the DRL also works as turn indicators.

Same for rear, the connected tail lamps makes it look wide. And make no mistake, the car is infact quite wide for its class. The inverted L patterns of the read light is very striking

One of the best angle IMO.

And the least flattering angle. Rear does looks like it got abruptly cut off.

Look at the gap in the wheel well with 195/60R16 tyres. IMO the car would look a lot hotter if its lowered a bit.

The highlight of this car. 1L turbo. It’s small but with good potential. I will any day pick this over the K12 NA 1.2L simply for its strong mid range. Unlike the NA version you don’t have to rev to extract power. Turbo lag is well controlled too. But at the end of the day, being a 3 Cylinder is a liability for the engine. it simply cannot match the creaminess of an 4 cylinder setup. I hope 1.4L BoosterJet comes to India at-least in models like the Grand Vitara and above. My average fuel efficiency was below 15kmpl, which has a lot to do with the driving pattern of frequent start stops around my hometown owing to the road construction. Speeds rarely go above 70kmph.

Dash is busy. I like simple elegant layouts where screens are neatly integrated into the dash (The Ciaz for example). Flat bottomed steering is nice to hold and is soo much lighter in low speeds compared to my 3 series. and the screen is big enough but with thick bezels around it which is a turn off. We are so used to bezel less designs these days that anything around a screen immediately makes it look cheap. Higher versions gets bigger screen, but bezels are very much still there.

Old style analogue speedos still hold its charm, I love them. Note how rev is just around 1100RPM in D mode (4th gear) at 40KMPH. II used M mode to hold into 3rd gear most of the time, it can pull from as low as 25 upto 60KMPH while staying in the power band.

Cheap looking gear selector with not the best shift pattern. I have grown used to having the R-N-D primary pattern where you can confidently pull down the selector to drive or push up to reverse. In this case, one needs to be precise while shifting else you might end up inadvertently in M (instead of D) or P (instead of R). But it’s a proper 6 speed torque converter AT with smooth and quick shifts. World apart from the AMTs that dominates the hatch and small crossover segment in India.

The beautiful triple LEDs in action. Bottom two are low beam and the top one is the high beam. Head lights are great with a very well defined and strong throw. A few flashes was all it needed to get the pesky high beamers in opposite direction to get into low beams.