Suzuki Vitara Review & Prices

The Suzuki Vitara is a small SUV with more off-road chops than most - top models get four-wheel drive, while the whole range has cute looks and lots of space. But it feels cheap inside, and the hybrid version is so bad to drive it’s best avoided.

The Vitara is a little like a terraced house in a good area - the price has nudged forward over the years until it’s the same price as bigger, more modern places with better interiors. The Vitara range starts at several thousand pounds more than a Volkswagen T-Cross, Dacia Duster or Skoda Kamiq, but it’s really feeling its age - especially on the inside, where it hasn’t changed a great deal since it launched back in 2015.

An update in 2025 tidied the styling up a little, with a new radiator grille design featuring a horizontal chrome strip, new front bumper design, and a new roof spoiler. It’s quite a smart, chunky-looking thing, and its upright proportions hint at excellent interior space.

And the Vitara doesn’t disappoint here - even though it has quite a small footprint, there’s more legroom and shoulder room than most alternatives, and headroom’s great even with the panoramic sunroof of top models. The boot isn’t quite so impressive, but at 362 litres it should suffice for a small family.

Unfortunately the interior design and quality is an area where the Suzuki Vitara shows its age. The 2025 facelift brought with it a new 9.0-inch touchscreen with wireless smartphone mirroring, but it feels a generation outdated already. Plus, the physical dials and the tiny screen that they flank are really behind the fully-digital instrument panels of most alternatives.

It’s nice that Suzuki keeps a fair bit of proper switchgear, including a full climate control panel, as it makes the Vitara much easier to use on the move. But material choice lets the side down, and the Vitara’s interior feels cheap and not as solid as you’d like for the price - a VW T-Cross is much more upmarket in this regard.

Driving the Vitara can be quite pleasant or really quite nasty depending on the engine you pick. The entry option is a 1.4-litre turbocharged petrol with a mild hybrid system that’s quite peppy, and paired to a slick six-speed manual gearbox. It’s genuinely quite good fun, and it’s available with a four-wheel drive system that makes it pretty good off-road, too.

The self-charging hybrid, on the other hand, is so clunky, slow and unrefined that it ruins the car - pretty much every other hybrid SUV on sale is a better bet.

Both versions are good fun in the corners, though - the Vitara is very light compared to most alternatives, and this pays out with a car that doesn’t lean too much in the bends, and feels eager and willing to corner hard. It’s even quite comfy on bumps round town and on the motorway.

Ultimately the Suzuki Vitara is an SUV that’s feeling its age in a few key ways, particularly inside - but it’s one of very few cars left with four-wheel drive and a manual gearbox, so it’s bound to make it onto some shortlists.

If you’re interested then check out our best Suzuki Vitara deals, or find a great Suzuki Vitara lease deal. You can search for a used Suzuki Vitara for sale, or find other used Suzukis for sale - and when you’re ready for car-changing, remember that Carwow can help you to sell your old car too.

The Suzuki Vitara’s price has crept up over the years, and its starting price of more than £27,000 makes it quite a lot dearer than the excellent Dacia Duster, Toyota Yaris Cross or Renault Captur. Even a pretty generous standard kit list can’t sweeten the deal enough. It’s about £1,800 extra if you’d like the Full Hybrid model (you wouldn’t), and if you want four-wheel drive you have to pay nearly £31,000 - £5,000 more than a top-spec Dacia Duster 4x4.

Deals well with bumps around town and handles corners nicely - just avoid the dire full hybrid model

In town

The Vitara is set quite high for a small SUV, and the driving position is nice and upright. The body has good square proportions and big windows all-round, so visibility is good and positioning the car on the road or in a parking space is a doddle. All models get rear parking sensors and a reversing camera, too.

It deals well with lumps and bumps around town, and the steering is really light too, so it’s easy to dart in and out of gaps in traffic. If you go for the manual model it can take a little while to get used to the feather-light clutch, but it’s nice and progressive when you do.

In most alternatives, the hybrid version is the best to drive around town - but not so in the Vitara. Because it uses an old-fashioned type of gearbox known as an automated manual, and because the electric motor isn’t very powerful, it doesn’t have the zippy response you hope for. It’s very clunky when changing gear and can feel like it’s bogged down if you ask for a burst of power at a junction or roundabout.

On the motorway

All versions of the Vitara get adaptive cruise control as well as blind-spot monitoring - both useful things to have on a long motorway drive. And all versions are comfortable for a long drive, though refinement isn’t fantastic with quite a lot of wind noise particularly.

It once again comes down to engine choices - where the 1.4-litre mild hybrid feels like it has enough poke to get up to speed without needing to be thrashed, the Full Hybrid is sluggish and unresponsive, often changing down to as low as third gear on motorway inclines just to maintain its speed.

On a twisty road

The Vitara feels sprightly and its light weight helps it change direction eagerly. Add in the light, accurate steering and the Vitara is actually quite fun to push down a good B-road.

It doesn’t lean too much in corners, despite its tall body, and if you opt for the four-wheel drive model you get even more grip on slippery roads or when pushing out of corners. It’ll even do a bit of mild off-roading, though don’t expect to keep up with a Land Rover Defender when the going gets tough.

Pretty good rear seat space, but the boot isn’t the biggest - and hybrid models are smaller still

The Vitara has a larger and more spacious cabin than many of its similarly-priced alternatives. The front seats offer a lot of movement, and the steering wheel can be adjusted for rake and reach. A centre armrest offers a place to store items you want to keep out of sight. There’s a cubby and a phone storage shelf ahead of the gearlever as well.

The front door bins have cut outs for large water bottles, although they aren’t padded so smaller items like keys will rattle around in there.

Space in the back seats

The Suzuki Vitara has three seats in the rear just like every other family SUV in this class, however it offers more legroom and shoulder room than many alternatives, including the Peugeot 2008 and Honda HR-V. Even with the panoramic sunroof you get in the Ultra trim, taller adults should have no issues with headroom.

That said, the centre seat is slightly narrower than the outside pair, and there is a small transmission hump in the floor which can get in the way when climbing into the middle. Two door bins and front seatback pockets are provided for storage.

Boot space

The Vitara has a relatively small boot for this class, offering 289 litres in self-charging hybrid trim, and 362 litres in mild hybrid form. A SEAT Arona offers 400 litres, while the Peugeot 2008 has 434 litres at its disposal. More comparable is the Honda HR-V self-charging hybrid, although it too has slightly more than the equivalent Vitara, offering 319 litres.

Things don’t improve much with the rear seats folded flat, as the storage area increases to just 642 litres, well behind the 1,200+ litres most alternatives offer. Still, the available space is very useable, thanks to a moveable boot floor, low loading lip and wide opening boot.

The Vitara’s interior is really feeling its age, and even a brand-new touchscreen can’t bring it up to date

The Suzuki Vitara’s interior hasn’t really changed too much since it went on sale back in 2015 - and some of the alterations are actually downgrades. Just take a look at the centre element between the two air vents - at launch it was a rather lovely analogue clock, but in the latest model it rather awkwardly contains the sensor for the driver attention monitor.

The 2025 update to the Vitara brought with it a new 9.0-inch touchscreen infotainment system. It’s an improvement on the 7.0-inch screen that came before it, but it still feels very clunky compared to the system in a Volkswagen T-Cross or the Google-based infotainment you get in a Renault Captur. It’s not very integrated with the car, either, so any functions outside of media or navigation you’ll have to do via the tiny screen between the (analogue) dials. It’s very awkward, especially when it comes to turning off some of the more irritating driver assistance systems.

At least you get Apple CarPlay and Android Auto connectivity, and both connect wirelessly - though a wireless phone charger isn’t available even as an option so you will eventually have to plug in anyway.

Build quality feels reassuringly solid, but material quality is a bit so-so. Sliding into the cloth seats of a basic Motion model, you’ll be greeted with a veiny grey plastic dashboard and some cheap-feeling silver trim. It feels quite hollow and doesn’t inspire much confidence in its longevity.

The Suzuki Vitara is offered with either a mild hybrid 1.4-litre turbocharged petrol engine, or a 1.5-litre full-hybrid petrol option. A six-speed manual is standard on the 1.4-litre, while an automatic transmission is fitted to the 1.5-litre engine. All-wheel-drive is an option for the 1.4 in top-spec ‘Ultra’ trim.

The mild hybrid officially returns around 53mpg, while the full hybrid is slightly ahead with an official figure of 56mpg. In reality, the full hybrid is so sluggish that you drive everywhere with the throttle pinned against the firewall - over a week with the car we returned less than 40mpg, versus an easy 46mpg in the mild hybrid model. Adding four-wheel drive will see your economy drop, but not by too much.

Neither of those figures are as good as you’d get from a hybrid Renault Captur, Dacia Duster or Toyota Yaris Cross, though, as all can return close to or over 60mpg.

CO2 emissions are relatively low for both engines, resulting in reasonable first-year road tax costs, but neither version has particularly impressive Benefit-in-Kind figures - you’ll need something like a plug-in hybrid MG HS, or a fully-electric equivalent for that.

The Vitara was last tested by Euro NCAP way back in 2015 - though it scored a full five-star result back then, that rating is now expired and it’s unlikely that it would do so well against the stricter, more modern protocols.

All models do come with the usual roster of active safety equipment, though it’s particularly annoying to try and adjust them as you have to do so through the tiny screen between the dashboard gauges. There’s no quick shortcut like you get in the best alternatives.

Owner surveys have shown that the Suzuki Vitara is a rugged and reliable SUV. Its low running costs and handling came in for praise. There have been just three recalls over the years, the most serious being a rear axle that may fail. Suzuki as a brand only came 19th out of 32 in the 2024 Driver Power owner satisfaction survey, though.

Suzuki has a service-activated warranty, like Toyota does - you get a standard three-year warranty, and thereafter every time you service your Vitara at an approved dealer you get an additional year and 10,000 miles of cover, up to a maximum of 10 years or 100,000 miles. That’s as good as Toyota’s coverage, and industry-leading - especially since it can be activated on used cars or transferred to the next owner.