Suzuki's Kei Cars, Running Mild in New Jersey
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — I don’t know if it’s possible for a Honda Element to mate with a toaster, but for the sake of argument, let’s just say that it can. The resulting offspring may have been on display at the Meadowlands here over the weekend.
For drivers who preregistered online, Suzuki was offering the chance to drive its Kizashi sedan through an obstacle course intended to showcase the car’s all-wheel-drive capabilities. But I was chiefly interested in the company’s “kei” class of cars, microcars that are not sold in the United States but are fixtures of city streets in Japan. Two examples — boxy little right-hand drivers riding on tires so small that the word “Yokohama” was lucky to fit on them — were available for testing.
The Wagon R Stingray , the larger one at 1,760 pounds, is about half the weight of an Element. At 133.7 inches it’s also 36 inches shorter, and at 58.1 inches wide, 13 inches narrower. The other, a Lapin, is even tinier. It’s not quite five feet tall, and even at a mere 5-foot-6, I felt like a Meadowlandian Gulliver standing beside it. I’ve never seen the top of my minivan, but I could reach over and pat the Lapin on the head as one would a dog.
Steve Younan, the American Suzuki director of product planning, marketing and sales training, told me that the company had the kei cars on display at this touring exhibition in part to gauge public reaction to them and determine whether it would be worth trying to introduce them in the United States. (The cars, he noted, did not meet American safety standards and would require beefier bumpers and other modifications.)
Here’s this American’s opinion: driving one of these cars would never make you feel like king of the road, but it would certainly make you feel like king of two other places, the gas station and the parking lot.
According to their window stickers, the 54-horsepower Stingray returns 51 m.p.g. and the Lapin 59 m.p.g. That’s with a standard, nonhybrid gasoline engine. It may be frightening to imagine being in a Lapin on the turnpike next to an overloaded 18-wheeler with a sleep-deprived driver, but it’s downright pleasant to imagine being in one in, say, the parking lot of the train station I use to get to work, Princeton Junction, one of the most crowded in New Jersey.
Finding a parking space there is like prospecting for gold, especially since sloppily parked mastodons often occupy just enough of an adjacent space to render it useless. That is, useless to a normal car, but not one measuring less than five feet wide. These little Suzukis, in short, would be the perfect train station car for commuters.
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