Mat’s Car of the Day: the Suzuki Swift is a steal at just £175 per month

I really like small, cheap, fun cars like the Suzuki Swift. They offer great value for money, will cost you peanuts to run and can still put a smile on your face. Here are three reasons I reckon you should consider a Suzuki Swift, plus a few drawbacks to consider.

Three reasons to buy a Suzuki Swift

1. It’s really economical

Before I took the car for a review, news editor Jamie Edkins lived with the Suzuki Swift for six months. In that time, and over 8,000 miles, it averaged almost 60mpg. That was over a range of motorway, city and country road driving, and speaking of country roads…

2. It’s good fun to drive

Part of the reason the Swift is so economical is that it’s really light, and lightness has other benefits through the corners. It feels really nimble and agile, and having a slick manual gearbox only adds to the fun.

3. You get loads of standard kit

For such a small, affordable car, the Swift comes with an impressive amount of tech. All cars get adaptive cruise control, heated front seats, a reversing camera, automatic high beams, blind spot monitoring and wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.

Suzuki Swift prices and deals

At just under £20,000, the Suzuki Swift is a bit of a bargain when you consider how much equipment you’re getting. But I think it’s even better value to lease a Swift.

Lease prices start from just £175 per month for the basic Motion model, which comes with all the kit you need. This is over three years with an initial payment of £2,387, and a mileage limit of 5,000 per year. You can double this to 10,000 miles per year for an extra £12 per month.

By comparison, a Renault Clio will cost you £217 per month with similar terms, but that’s for one with much less equipment than the Swift. If you want to lease a small, affordable hatchback, the Suzuki is hard to beat in terms of value.

Three drawbacks to the Suzuki Swift

While I do like the Swift, it’s not perfect. Here are three cons to consider before committing.

1. The cabin feels cheap

Even by affordable car standards, the Swift’s cabin feels pretty low-rent. There isn’t a single soft-touch material in sight, and the seats look and feel particularly cheap. A Peugeot 208 is much posher inside.

2. Dated infotainment system

The 9.0-inch touchscreen you get in the Suzuki Swift looks ancient compared to the slick Google-based system you can get in a Renault Clio. The graphics are washed out and it’s slow to respond to your inputs, but at least you do get wireless smartphone mirroring.

3. It’s noisy at speed

The Suzuki Swift is perfectly capable of doing long journeys, Jamie took it from London to Cornwall a couple of times, but if you do regular long distance runs then this might not be the right small car for you. It lets in quite a lot of wind and road noise; a Volkswagen Polo is much more refined.

But it’s easy to forgive the Swift for these shortcomings, because it has a lot of character. It’s a refreshingly honest cheap car which isn’t pretending to be anything but, and that’s why I recommend it.

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*Savings are made up of the maximum dealer discount off RRP – subject to dealership, location and trim. Prices correct at the time of writing.