Suzuki Swift - Reliability & safety

The latest Suzuki Swift has only just arrived and is too new to have been included in the latest 2023 Driver Power satisfaction survey, but the brand has been slipping down the rankings in recent years. It’s now 22nd out of 32 manufacturers, one place lower than its 2022 position, with owners saying they were most disappointed by their cars’ interior quality, safety features, and boot space. There were some positives, though, because just eight per cent of those owners experienced a fault with their cars – comfortably the lowest number of any of the 32 manufacturers surveyed.

The Swift only received a three out of five star result from safety experts Euro NCAP. While it is hard for smaller cars to gain the maximum five star rating because you need a lot of sometimes costly autonomous safety technology to achieve top marks, it is disappointing to read that the dashboard in the Swift posed an injury risk to the knees of some front passengers, and there wasn’t sufficient protection for the chest of people sitting in the front or back. The Swift also lost points for not having a countermeasure to prevent front seat occupants' heads from hitting each other in a side impact.

All versions of the Suzuki Swift come with an upgraded Autonomous emergency braking (AEB) that’s better able to spot pedestrians and cyclists at night. It also comes with blind-spot monitoring to warn you of vehicles in your blind spots on the motorway. There’s also adaptive cruise control to keep you a safe distance from the car in front, and lane keep assistance to help keep you within your lane on dual-carriageways and motorways.

Warranty

The standard Suzuki manufacturer’s warranty is three years or 60,000 miles. If you look towards Hyundai, you’ll find a longer five-year warranty with unlimited mileage. One year’s worth of breakdown cover is offered, which is the same as Hyundai and MG. 

You can extend the Suzuki warranty in a similar way to Toyota. By having your Swift serviced at a Suzuki main dealer, it increases the cover by 12 months or 10,000 miles with every service. It can be extend up to the same 100,000 miles as the Toyota one, but the length of cover only goes up until the car is seven years old, rather than the 10 years of cover Toyota provides.

Servicing

Service intervals for the Suzuki Swift are annually or every 12,500 miles, whichever comes first. Some rivals have extended biannual servicing, but at least the trade-off with the Suzuki service regime is that you can keep extending the manufacturer’s warranty as described in the section above.