Suzuki Australia has just announced a new base Jimny variant will join the range from August this year.
The Jimny Lite swaps the standard car’s alloy wheels for 15-inch steel ones, LED headlights for halogens, normal mirror covers for plastic-textured units, and standard touchscreen with sat-nav and Apple CarPlay/Android Auto for an old school head unit with Bluetooth.
The 1.5-litre petrol engine is unchanged, but the Lite will only come with a five-speed manual gearbox with separate low-range 4×4 shifter: the regular Jimny’s four-speed auto will not be made available in this application.
The first batch of Jimny Lites are expected to leave the Japanese factory in July, with an initial allocation number as-yet undetermined.
Having just received a green light, Suzuki Australia is now working on pricing. Presumably it will undercut the regular Jimny manual that retails for $28,490 before on-road costs (in the real world there are markups to consider, given demand).
As with the regular Jimny – which still has wait lists of six to 12 months in some cases – expect demand for the Lite to outstrip supply. As we reported a month back, Suzuki Australia had to change its backend in a bid to cut wait times.
The company used to allocate stock to each dealer based on their respective sales performance over the preceding six months. But the rejigged process simply puts everybody who places an order in a national queue.
Regardless of where they are or how their chosen dealership performed, they are the next in line to take delivery.
The Jimny Lite will be sold under the same system. People on a wait list for a normal Jimny who wish to buy a Jimny Lite instead must transfer their order and go into a new queue.
Suzuki Australia’s general manager Michael Pachota told CarExpert this week that the company was excited at the prospect of having another Jimny iteration.
“We’re giving people what they want – more Jimny’s! With demand continuously increasing for this model we are so pleased to be able to add another variant in the line-up and continue to grow our Jimny community with this incremental supply opportunity.
“We will also maintain the fair allocation process based on customer orders with a queue system as we have done with the current Jimny in 2021, making sure the next order in the queue gets the next car to hit Australian soil, every time.”
A dedicated page on suzuki.com.au with more information on the Jimny Lite will be live on July 1.
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