NEW Suzuki Swift vs Renault Clio

Not once in my 40 years of driving has a passenger ever felt the need to scratch my dashboard or door cards. Not once. Nor have I felt the need. What is it about reviewers and scratchy plastic?

I am a bit sad, this interests me more than watching lambos drag race on a runway.

Hope there is a new Swift Sport...

That swift went from cool kid on the block to fugly but still capable

Nice review, obviously two closely matched cars. Scratchy plastics 🤔. My Sister 's Golf GTI had lotso of scratchy plastic, it's functional and easy to keep clean, no big deal. I've had Suzukis for 20 years and never had any problems. It's Suzuki's reliabiliability that would probably tip it for me again, but it's difficult to beat French flair, but every French I've had had been unreliable. I currently run a non hybrid Swift Sport and have been holding out to see if a new Sport will come out way. It will be a sad day if we don't get one. 😊👍👏👏

I have the prfect automotive combination, an immaculate 2008 Jaguar XJR and a new Dacia Sandero. In honesty the Dacia is all the car 95% of people need, the Jag is for jollies and long journeys.

Clio is always the small car that my heart is with .. but the Yaris is the one we bought (my wife) - cracking car

13:26, naughty bit of driving by the Lexus.....

Dear Autocar, I am still subscribed as your channel, feels to me, the most literal translation of the ancient written car review medium to video format. Please though, up the production where needed (sound mainly and interior videography). However, I loved this video, your banter and chemistry - thank you. Another old car enthusiast at heart

is the new clio better than the Peugeot 208? I personally found the seats in the clio very very hard and the 208 seemed like a more settled ride to be honest.

WTAF have they done with the styling of the swift ?!

One of them will probably last WAY longer than the other. Japanese engineering every time 😊

Current Swift looks terrible compared to the previous ones.

An actual helpful road test which could help me to decide on my next car.

Have they improved the manual gearbox? I have driven Captur couple of years ago. It's gearbox was inaccurate, sloppy and vague. I liked the car and 0.9 litre engine but can't stand the gearbox.

Here’s my take on the Clio, we’ve got the mk4, and a 24-year-old mk2 (phase 1 D7f engine, which is to say, 8 valves and a friendlier front grille). The tce 90, the mk4, has never had a month when there wasn’t something wrong with it. Not to say it doesn’t have its great points, and it’s much longer legs than the older, smaller Clio mk2, so nicer on the motorway. But, you know how as you get older, you talk to older friends and they are carrying a couple of ailments that take forever to sort, if they ever do? Our Clio 4 was bought brand new in 2015 in cash/no loan, and was a big investment for my spouse at the time. Immediately I spotted the front door curve nearside, didn’t match the front wing curve, where they met at the hinge end…no big deal, if my spouse didn’t notice I wasn;t gonna mention it, nonetheless, it’s a fault. The number plate at the front was poorly attached. They just needed to gently bend it to the necessary curve, and use better sticky-tab glue pads. The rear one wasn’t on straight. I did the necessary, cutting my hands because for some reason, the aluminium backing plate was cut rough as a dog. This I understand to be a dealer task, so that’s down to them, but again, it’s a fault. So far, so little though, these are minor. At month 3, it’s summer properly, and I notice coolant needs added. It’s low in the reservoir. I assumed this was a service thing, and it wasn;t really losing coolant, it was just I was seeing it when it was particularly warm or cold. Anyway, by month 6 it was clear it was definitely losing coolant…and because I didn’t want to either burst my wife’s car-bubble, or have the experience of hokey-cokey with the dealer over a weird/persistent/intermittent fault, I solidly kept this secret to myself. I resolved, it would only be mentioned, when it became solvable without losing use of the car and inconveniently taking it back and forth to a dealer, multiple times. This experience, is EXACTLY what some people reporting the same fault with either Captur cars, or the Clio 4, on ‘Honest John’ online, were having. Weeks at a time without the car, money being requested despite it being a clear warranty claim, etc. Dunno what it is, it just goes on as you;d expect. Finally, I gave in about year 4. It was now needing topped up every week or less with coolant, which made me conclude, it was now going to leave a trail big enough to have it tracked down…and so it was. Went to Howarth’s garage in Mirfield and they tracked it to a plastic moulding buried under this that and the other, deep in the bowels of the engine bay, they’d found crystals suggestive of coolant being evaporated off. Fixed it with a new plastic moulding and gasket or whatever. I played this correctly. Others writing in, to Honest John, confirmed what would have happened. This stuff, can be milked for years by a stupid or unscrupulous dealer. They’ll say they’ve fixed it, but they don’t care. None of the disaster stories resulted in a fix by replacing the moulding Howarth’s did. We on the other hand, got it fixed on day 3 the garage had it, and there was no to-ing and fro-ing for months or years over it. We lost the car for just 3 days, that’s a win for this fault. This part, simply shouldn’t be plastic, I suspect, it gets a lot of heat deep down there, in a 900cc turbocharged engine. Anyway, that was 4 years ago. What next, well it’s suspension I think. On the old Clio, even the mk2 and mk3, they use a type of front subframe that is solidly connected to the front nose grille of the car by an inverted ‘U’ bracket. In the mk4/tce 90 since 2014, they eliminated that big bracket, opting for a high-tensile bolt of the sort normally found on cylinder heads. The idea must be, this exerts so much compression on the various parts, somehow, it doesn’t need a ‘U’ bracket. But it doesn’t actually firmly attach the front to the subframe. It’s held together by French spit and garlic. I literally don’t understand how this arrangement works. And, it’s got two tasks you will encounter as an amateur, where fixing the suspension or replacing parts, that require the detaching of this subframe-to-front section, will catch you out. One, the high-tensile bolt has a fancy, tiny head on it. It’s an E16 head, or ‘external torx’ size 16. It looks like a 13mm socket might do it - don’t try it, you’ll round things off then be unable to tighten it properly on reassembly. It’s a surprise, is my point. My work stopped on Friday night and the local parts store had no such socket types. This, blocked me doing the job, and i hadda finish up then we spent hundreds having the garage redo it all. The fact it was now easier as I’d de-seized everything, doesn’t make it cheaper. Renault got me good, I’d rather have had an old ugly ‘U’ bracket. But that’s not the worst bit - the front subframe is gagging to be jacked up near the wheel - however, if you do this, this hi-tension bolt is under a lot of strain and as SOON as you get it out, the subframe suddenly will bend upwards under the weight of the car. Like I say, Renault really got me. But now, I know these wheezes and have the necessary weird tools and won’t be fooled by jacking up at the wrong point, so I should be ok with this job the next time? I’m not persuaded. And, the lower control arm/wishbone fitted last year, at that MOT, failed this year’s MOT also. This, means our roads in the UK have the better of this vehicle’s suspension. This is a long time, doing all this, it’s occurring over a period of years, and that out-of-whack front curved wing, is still noticeably wonky now, plainly a manufacturing defect, but Renault wouldn’t fix it as such, we know this. The suspension plainly now is going to be getting parts replaced annually or bi-annually, so that inspires no confidence. £500 MOTs are so-so when the car is worth over ten grand. Down at half that, you think twice…oh but hold on I haven’t mentioned the clutch… …the clutch which actually developed that fault many dual-mass flywheels have, the damping grease gets lost from the springs in the clutch-plate, or wherever these are. Now you have a juddering clutch/take-up. The driver’s ‘fix’ is to rev the engine like a learner, and wear the clutch out faster, but it avoids most of the backlashing slop/judder when setting off. So, that’s been around since before the coolant leak got fixed…you see what I mean, about this car carrying ailments around non-stop, unbroken, its whole life? 9 years now. I have called it a bag of sh!t on more than one occasion. The overall impact is a feeling of impending disaster, of the manufacturer warranty being useless in practice, which also means really that service pack of three grand my wife paid, wasn’t worth jack either, because you only get that, to make the Renault warranty valid. I’d never get another service pack. So, what would make it right, as the car sits on the drive now after almost ten years of troublesome driving? There’s a clunk from the side that had the hi-tensile bolt issue, and the garage didn’t fit a new bolt, so it remains. That’s almost a thousand pounds and 3 years of clunking, it is never going away. The clutch judder, well, we’ll wait til the clutch wears out, and it’s not worth biting the bullet at 70k miles, it;s £500 to over a grand, depending who does the job. This is clearly a manufacturing defect also, but again you know Renault would never agree to fix it. The water bottle for the scoosher, has broken one of its mountings, I used a wooden block and a stainless steel screw to bolster it, so it’s not the thing clunking, but this ought not to break. It’s flimsy. Taken in any one singular aspect, you can make a case for how well-made the Clio mk4 tce 90 is. But the trouble is, our overall experience is of a car that has carried serious deal-breaking ailments since day one. Manufacturing defects that remain to this day because we cannot afford a grand or more to fix them, and Renault wouldn’t dream of helping out. £14,000 for the car, and £3,000 of wasted money for servicing to make the rubbish shirt warranty be valid. Absolutely awful. I just couldn’t buy one of these things. I made the mistake of fixing some stuff myself, and that’s made it affordable - wish I hadn’t, we’d have gotten rid sooner before the clutch exploded with grease, losing it’s damping of rotational backlash on setting-off. In other words, I kept my wife happy by not letting her in on, all the serious issues that plagued this car from day one. I strongly feel there’s more…there was a broken spring, but even the robust mk2 had that, it’s our rotten roads…I replaced the plugs with iridium, that helped as usual keep maintenance down…that’s probably it. Oh, inherently it’s got terrible torque low-down, it really needs a Honda-style electric motor slapped on the end of the three-cylinder engine, and a few kg of hybrid battery somewhere, but this seems to be another ten grand?! Phfft, as the French would say…but I love the little mk2, which was an altogether great experience! Oh, and the mpg is pretty awful. The mk2 gets 44mpg max, and drops to as low as 35mpg in the worst conditions (eg lots of cold-engine, 2-mile journeys)…the mk4 gets er, 44 mog max, and as low as 36mpg in the worst conditions - but it is a lot faster, and bigger/heavier of course. Oh, back-seat passengers, it’s an awful ride. Dunno, I just haven’t taken to it…I love the electric steering?! Not great for me, good-looking car though. I’d sell it or something a lot more final…!

The Swift has mind blowingly low fuel consumption... Clio 1.5 dCi used to have that low consumption back in the days. But diesel is no more...

Please show us interiors..

Considering they were so close, would the fact that the Swift is £70 per month cheaper to lease sway your decision? We are currently looking at our next lease after a Fiat 500 and we're considering these 2 plus the 208 and Corsa. I'm leaning towards the Swift as it's so much cheaper.

Got the 2023 Swift and we are generally quite impressed two big reasons the 7 year warranty and the price with a Tier 1 discount. I would like the 6 speed in the Clio and that extra smidge of refinement but as someone who buys and keeps rsther than leases i can see being swayed by price and warranty being more important to us. At £15k for the lower trim Swift and the generally better dealers that bit of extra space would need to really matter. We will give the new one a look in August to see whether its worth changing though the speed warning TSR needs an easier disable.