After a black-ice related accident totalled my 1999 Suzuki Swift, I was in a somewhat precarious position. I didn’t have much money for a car and I was also scared to drive something that small again. So I didn’t really have much choice. My old Chrysler LeBaron (see previous COAL) was still barely alive as my dad sometimes drove it, but it wasn’t reliable in the least. However, my spouse had a spare vehicle.
It was a spiffy-looking Suzuki Sidekick.
Like my Swift, it had been manufactured at CAMI in Ingersoll. He’d bought it a couple years previously but had never really warmed to it, particularly as a highway vehicle. So he went and bought a 1993 Saab 900 and the Sidekick was surplus.
While he was planning on selling it at the end of the driveway, my lack of a car and my need for one led to him offering it to me. “Just pay me back when you can,” he said. I did, but he eventually ended up selling it to me for less than half of its book value. It was a very nice gesture and a hallmark of our almost 14-year relationship; he wasn’t keen on giving me expensive things outright (would ruin my character, as he said) but he would almost always help me out if I was in a jam. And until my school career would finish in 1.5 years, my cash reserves were at an all-time low.
I got to really like the Sidekick, sometimes at least. It’s 95-hp 1.6 litter engine had decent low-end pep, and it’s small dimensions would fit in almost all the places that the Swift would. As a highway commuter however it was not the best vehicle. The vehicle had a five-speed manual transmission, but the gearing seemed awfully low. While driving at 115 km/h the little engine would be revving at 4200 rpm. At 125 it would be over 5000 rpm. The buzzy little mill seemed happiest when driving at about 105 and no more.
Highway driving was more adventurous than the Swift. Its short wheelbase and high profile meant it got blown around very easily. I’d have to crank the wheel towards the left lane anytime a big transport went by me, and driving in high winds was…exciting or harrowing depending on ones point of view.
When I finished school for that year and was driving mostly around town I got a nice surprise. Around town driving was actually a lot more economical than on the highway – it rose to about 26 mpg versus no more than 20 on the highway.
The Sidekick was also a soft top. I thought this would be great in the summertime; however taking the top down and especially putting it back up was more of a chore than I’d anticipated. I think I only had the top fully down once or twice in the time I’d owned it. However I often drove with the top over the front passenger seats open which was a lot easier to do.
The Sidekick served me well as I finished school and transitioned to the world of full-time work. A couple of times I left the front sunroof portion of the car open and the car got caught in a rainstorm, which made the interior pretty smelly until it dried out.
However, as I began to get older, the Sidekick’s shortcomings started to get to me. While it was reliable mechanically, the engine started to use oil between changes. And the four-wheel drive system, while rugged and helpful in deep snow (I never did take it off-road), the rudimentary system required getting out and locking the hubs (and unlocking them when 4wd was no longer necessary).
However, the sidekick’s biggest issue was the vinyl top. In winter the wind leaked around every seam, and the weak heater meant that on really cold days double socks and heavy winter boots were required to stop my feet from getting really cold.
I looked for a used hard top but was unlucky (and the 2000-plus I saw from ebay sellers with them was out of reach of a young man making a community newspaper reporters salary).
Around the beginning of 2005, Mercedes-Benz Canada finally confirmed that they were bringing the Smart Car to this country. My partner John had long wanted one, so he ordered one straight from the factory and was estatic when it was delivered that June.
Meanwhile, the 1993 Saab 900 that he’d got to replace the Sidekick was now surplus. As the trade-in value from the Ottawa Mercedes dealer was something less that $1000, he offered to give it to me if I sold the Sidekick and split the profit with him.
I’d driven the Saab a few times and appreciated its quirky nature, super-comfortable seats and, most importantly, fixed metal roof. So I put the Sidekick on Autotrader. I sold it to a man who said he wanted it to get back and forth to his hunting camp.
In hindsight, I wish I’d kept it a few years longer, as the Saab turned out to be an absolute nightmare and the only vehicle I’ve had that I could honestly say was a total lemon. But that’s a COAL for another day.
The Sidekick was considered a Sport-Cute. It was quite popular in Germany too. The warning was though that this little 4 wheel drive thing may go up declines so steep that the brakes couldn’t handle going down. So when you see a Sidekick on a butte you know what happened. Good thing you kept it on the road.
There was a recent Car and Driver article where they bought a bunch of old, beater 4WD vehicles, took them off-road, and compared. One of them was the Sidekick’s twin, the more prolific Geo Tracker. The upshot was the Tracker was the most civilized of the bunch and easiest to drive on the street. When those vehicles were new, even though they had their faults (as pointed out in this CC), they ‘were’ a better choice than, say, a Jeep Wrangler for daily-driving.
Those sidekicks were crude, but great vehicles. My mother bought one new in 1994 when going through a divorce. It was fuscia in color, with a 5 speed, no air conditioning and a black soft top. She owned “Pinky” for something like 18 years. It became a third car and was relegated to occasional use by the time it was about a decade old, but it went from NJ to Colorado (where it became the ultimate ski bunny Barbie mobile) and eventually came to Florida, where it was sold a few years ago to a kid who lives just down the street from Mom now. He fell asleep at the wheel last spring and did some significant body damage, but still had plans to get “Pinky” back in the road. Aside from a whole slew of new seals and gaskets to resolve some oil seepage issues that little trucklet was bullet-proof. I haven’t seen Pinky in a while, and am unsure whether she’s still puttering along, but she’s immortal in our family lore. My youngest brother still laughs about having to drive Pinky when visiting mom in Colorado for ski vacations. At 6’4″ and 240lbs it was true comedy to see, but all in all everybody in the family misses Pinky.
The Sidekick and Tracker were always in the “underrated” category by most off-road enthusiast publications. Nobody thought much of them when they were still available new (thought they we’re toys that Daddy would buy his little girl) but they were much more capable than they looked.
In high school (graduated 1995) I badly wanted a Tracker convertible with manual transmission and manual hubs. I remember pouring through the accessories ads of “Four Wheel and Off Road” magazine trying to figure out the tallest widest tires you could fit on a stock suspension Tracker. Oh and I wanted one of the aftermarket fiberglass hardtops to replace the soft top.
I know a guy who had a Sidekick for a winter beater. Top quality winter tires all round. All fluids changed over to synthetic, Optima battery, larger block heater, remote starter and winch on the front. It never failed and I haven’t seen anything to this day that went down snow packed roads like it did. Not great looking but well purpose prepared to battle the worst possible conditions.
I had a girlfriend in college who drove one, and was just getting around to getting her license. She almost rolled it a couple of times.
In the mid 1980s I read about the earlier Suzuki Samurai in car mags but living in Manhattan I never saw one locally. Then I started to go to California one a month and they were everywhere. These little semi-convertible utes always seemed (to me) to be driven by happy tanned young people brimming with a sense of carefree and hedonistic félicité.
The scenario for this travel was I’d get up at 4:30 A.M. on a Monday, walk through the dirty snow and slush to Third Avenue, hail a cab to JFK, take the early TWA (remember them?) flight to LA, and drive my compact Avis sedan to Columbia Pictures Burbank surrounded by these open top Samurais.
I often thought: “Am I doing this living thing right?” These people seem so happy!
Thank you for clarifying some of these misconceptions I had about owning and driving the early cute-utes from Suzuki (assuming the later Sidekick was similar to the earlier Samurai).
Of course at the end of the week, I couldn’t wait to hear the announcement on the red eye’s PA system that we were descending into JFK airspace where the local temperature was 24 degrees with a light snow falling.
Ive warmed to these things a lot. As a long time Jeep fanatic, I saw these as a cuter, softer alternative. Nowhere near as beefy, capable or ‘macho’ as a Wrangler but hey, it had 2 doors, a ragtop and a real truck based dual range 4wd system so it wasn’t a total loss. Back in the day, these were a joke compared to the Jeeps or even the Isuzu Amigo that they competed with but something like this with real capability off pavement seems worlds ahead of any CUV which is a glorfied econobox on stilts. One of these cheap would make a helluva fun winter beater that can still slog around the backroads.