GM Teams Up with Suzuki to Create New City Cars

Splash Photos

Sooner or later, we're going to get cars like this. (Photo: Opel)

Interior is colorful, and smart looking. (Photo: Opel)

No longer a kei car, the Agila doesn't look like a box on wheels. (Photo: Opel)

General Motors introduced the latest generation of city car with its partnerSuzuki this past week. The Opel and Vauxhall Agila, and the Suzuki Splash will make their debut this September at Frankfurt in this competitive segment. The new Agila and Splash are based off of the fun-to-drive European Suzuki Swift platform, and will replace the previous Agila and the Wagon R, which were of a much older design and essentially Japanese Kei cars, designed solely for the city. The vehicle that these new tots replace was essentially a box with wheels. The new car, despite its high roof, actually looks like a regular small car complete with flared fenders, greenhouse-style windows, large headlamps and vertical taillights. It’s far from the transportation appliance that was the Wagon R, and is a rather friendly looking machine.

The interior is another gigantic separator between new and old. The old car looked like it came right out of the mid 1980s with lots of hard, cheap plastics that were brittle and shiny. The new car might still incorporate hard plastics in order to make it affordable, but the layout is much moreinteresting and there’s plenty of color splashed around the creatively-styled dash and console. The car is set up with high-mounted seats for easy entry and exit, while the console-mounted gearshift is always within a couple of inches of the driver’s hand. Agilas and Splashes also have steering wheel mounted radio controls and a stereo head unit that’s flushly integrated into the console. Additionally, both cars have flat-folding rear seats which open up total storage space of more than 40+ cubic-feet.

These small cars have small engines; much smaller than just about anything that isn’t a hybrid. A three-cylinder that produces just 65 horsepower powers base versions, but there’s a more powerful 86-hp 1.2-liter inline-four on the cards too. The top of the line engine is a 1.3-liter turbodiesel that makes 75 horsepower and 140 lb-ft of torque, a vast quantity more than the old Agila and Wagon R. Still, these are ultra-efficient machines thatnot only sip fuel yet meet the pending European carbon dioxide goals. They’re also available with ESP and curtain airbags, pluses given the size of the vehicle.

What makes the Agila and Splash so interesting to us is that these two vehicles are essentially the maturation of GM’s city car lineup, and will eventually be sold across much of the globe. Chevrolet of Europe, for instance, will be receiving a version of this car called the Beat; previously, its smallest vehicle, the Matiz, was a product of GM Daewoo.

At the New York International Auto Show earlier this year, Chevrolet launched a trio of little city cars and asked the public which they liked best. If General Motors sees that there’s a growing demand for such small vehicles – which there seems to be – there’s a chance that this little hatchback might make its way across the Atlantic to our soil.