Suzuki Kashashi

Long story short is that some relatives have a Suzuki Kashashi that they are potentially looking to sell due to it sitting and not getting used. Mrs. Dx has a co-worker looking for a beater vehicle. How are the Kashashis as a whole? KBB looks to be in the $2k on this one.

I see one in the parking garage at work every day, it still looks decent and seems to be reliable enough for someone to commute in.

The Kizashi was supposedly a brilliant car, just too late to save Suzuki North America.

I think the biggest issue with the Kizashi is that it says Suzuki on the back.  Oddly they seem to hold their value even worse than the SX4 and I doubt there's any rational reason for that situation.  Never owned one so nothing really useful to add.

Getting Suzuki parts sucked when they actually had a presence here. Plan on waiting for parts if you ever need anything that can't be had at the local NAPA.

It was considered a very decent car when it came out, lots of fairly positive reviews, but was a bit of a last ditch effort before Suzuki folded up shop in the U.S.A.  As a result, parts availability would probably be an issue.  Shouldn't be any more/less reliable than the second tier Asian automakers (i.e. not Honda/Toyota) but being stranded because of an unobtainium/long wait part could be a deal killer.

-Rob

I always thought they looked good as well

I even drove one turbocharged by Suzuki. But, yeah, too little too late. 

chandler said:

I always thought they looked good as well

That car was built and ran by magazine freelancer Richard Holdener. If the name sounds familiar, he was the guy who wrote the article where they hung two turbos on a junkyard 5.3L and made 1200+hp, and then discovered it was a 4.8L. That was the article that really kicked of the junkyard LS turbo trend. His YouTube channel has gone on to test just about every engine-building myth and LS cylinder head, intake manifold and camshaft combo known to man.

The Kizashi Bonneville car ran a huge honkin' turbo and went seriously fast, like 200+mph. Holdener tried yanking off the turbo and setting it up to run on nitrous to go chase records in another class, but it didn't work out like they hoped. People said the tuning sessions where he had the car running up on jackstands while he tweaked the ECM tune where the stuff Bonneville legends are made of though.

Too bad it didn't get the awd 300hp v6 of the concept from NYIAS.

Looks like tgey sold a whopping 20k of them in the US total.  Good luck getting parts.

In reply to rob_lewis :

So far my '11 SX4 has needed usual consumable suspension parts like struts, shocks, and front control arms replaced (needs to happen again, annoyingly) and I've replaced the serp belt and the plugs once.  In 141k miles.  That's it.  Fluids and struts. 

I'll take that kind of "second tier" reliability any day.  The thing isn't perfect but it runs like a train.  Kizashi might be an issue due to being more complex and then who's owned the example in question and how it was treated.

Any of the folks saying the parts supply would be hard with a Kizashi actually own one OR checked on parts for one of these cars? 

My business degree makes me want to say sell the car parts at the Suzuki bike dealers so that there's some residual revenue from selling cars here and more business for the motorcycle shops but I guess that's not really viable or they'd do it.

One of my friends bought a Kizashi new and is still rocking that thing with no major issues.  Of course, he also got a brand new V6 Camaro in 1995 when we were in high school and drove that thing to 250k+, also with no major issues.  Maybe he just lucky?  It sure as hell wasn't mechanical sympathy or aptitude.