Suzuki News

Suzuki held tarmac tests for the SX4 WRC in June in southern Europe.  The European tests started in April, but these were the first fully fledged tarmac tests. The SX4 WRC brought in for testing was evolved further from the earlier prototype design; in fact, its specifications are already close to what is planned to be fielded in this season’s WRC test entries. 

Throughout five days of driving tests, the team confirmed the performance and reliability of the much improved car. Then in the course of a further five days they worked on refining the basic settings of each component to investigate further performance upgrades.

The course selected for the latest round of testing had a layout that included big ups and downs and successive tight corners and the SX4 WRC demonstrated stable performance without encountering any significant troubles, both through low-to-mid-speed corners and on high-speed runs.

Nobuhiro Tajima, President of Suzuki Sport, comments as follows:

“The car is shaping up to an extent that I think it’s competitive to quite a degree. But our rivals’ machines are also evolving as faster and stronger, so we need to make sure we find even more speed and performance for our car.  That’s why we’ve decided to move up our schedule and try and see if we could incorporate into our test-entry 2007 model the specs originally intended for the 2008 Championship entry model.

We really need to go to such a distance to have a fighting chance in the WRC. We’ve taken time in for testing in Japan and Europe aimed at achieving further improvement and now our car is demonstrating good performance on tarmac. Corsica is just a few months away, and we’ll be working to steadily improve and bring the car to top shape so we can hope to show some fast times.”

For the team, hard at work in Europe, tests after tests will continue in the days to come, in the quest to bring out more competitive performance from the Suzuki SX4 WRC.

Suzuki Motor Corporation has decided to build a new automobile assembly production plant in St Petersburg to meet the growing demand for new cars in the Russian market. The 243,000 square metre sized plant will be built in St Petersburg’s Shushary industrial zone.

An agreement on the new plant’s construction was signed on 8 June, 2007 by Suzuki’s Chairman and CEO, Osamu Suzuki, and Russia’s Minister of Economic Development and Trade, Herman Gref, who were attending the St Petersburg Economic Forum.

Mr Suzuki also signed a memorandum with the Governor of St Petersburg, Valentina Matvienko, agreeing to conduct studies on strategic investment in the Shushary industrial zone.

The St Petersburg plant will represent an investment of approximately 90 million euro (14 billion Japanese yen) and is scheduled to start operating in the latter half of 2009. Models planned for production are the Grand Vitara compact sport utility vehicle and the SX4 sport crossover vehicle.

With 500 employees in the new plant, Suzuki targets production of 5,000 units in the plant’s first year of operation and future annual production of 30,000 units. In 2006, Suzuki’s 30 dealers in Russia sold 16,000 units of the Grand Vitara and other models.

Overview of new plant

Company name (tentative): SUZUKI AUTO MFG RUS LLC

Location: St Petersburg’s Shushary industrial zone

Investment ratio: 50% Suzuki Motor Corporation,

50% Itochu Corporation

Plant site area: 243,000 sqm

Total investment: approx. 90 million euro (14 billion Japanese yen)

Models to be produced: Grand Vitara and SX4

Number of employees: 500