Category: Superminis 
Price Range: £8,995 to £10,845
Compact but roomy, smooth engines, tidy handling, lively diesel.
Ride can get fidgety, cabin trim devoid of padding, meagre boot, indicator bleeper might drive you mad.
This is a proper supermini-sized supermini, and good value for what you get.
It all went wrong for the Suzuki Wagon R and its Vauxhall/Opel clone, the Agila. The square-cut mini-MPV, loved by the young Japanese buyers for whom it was designed, never quite hit the spot in Europe. Most of its buyers were of retirement age, people who liked the practicality while appearing oblivious to the squareness that had delighted the Japanese and left young Europeans cold.
So meet the replacement, designed in Japan with Europe in mind. As with the Wagon R, the new Suzuki Splash is to be made at the Magyar Suzuki factory in Hungary. The new Agila will be made alongside it and - apart from bonnet, tailgate, bumpers, headlights and badges - is the same Suzuki-designed car right down to the suspension settings.
The Splash is based on a Suzuki Swift platform with 30mm excised from the wheelbase. That dimension is still long for a car competing at the small end of supermini-dom, as the short front overhang and almost non-existent rear one demonstrate. There's a touch of Smart Fortwo and Aygo/C1/107 about the rear styling, with the wheel arches actually projecting beyond the vertical tailgate, but here the tail lights are tall and arrow-shaped and the waistline is a rising wedge.
There's a wide-tracked dynamism to the Splash's styling entirely absent from the Wagon R, and that fun-to-use look continues inside. This is an unashamedly honest, low-cost car as the hard cabin surfaces reveal, but the use of textured colour and ample oval forms lifts it beyond the utilitarian. The top models get a neat pod-mounted rev counter, too.
Three engines are offered, two of them new Suzuki petrol-fuelled designs of very light weight - a key factor in the Splash's relatively modest kerb weight which starts at 975kg. The smaller new unit, a 1.0-litre three-cylinder with 65bhp, is not yet confirmed for UK sale but we'll definitely get the 1.2-litre, 86bhp four-cylinder which is also available with a four-speed automatic transmission. The third engine is the familiar Fiat-designed 1.3-litre turbodiesel here delivering 75bhp. It's supplied by Suzuki's Indian engine factory.
When it goes on sale in the UK in March 2008 it will be priced from around £8,000.
