Suzuki Vitara Brezza geared for affordable road trips

In an effort to make the coverage of our long-term vehicles as comprehensive as possible, The Citizen likes to throw in the odd economy run. This month it was the turn of our long-term Suzuki Vitara Brezza.

Since we’ve welcomed Suzuki’s compact SUV in top-spec GLX auto guise to our fleet in April, we’ve taken quite a few road trips in racking up just over 5 000 km.

On average, we’ve returned a fuel consumption number ranging between six-odd to seven-odd litres per 100km. That is roughly what you can expect from a car with a claimed average consumption of 6.2 L/100 km in the real world.

Brezza’s road trip stretched from Randburg to the to Magalies Canopy Tours on the other side of the Buffelspoort Dam.

So it was high time to put the Vitara Brezza through a proper little test to see just how frugal its 1.5-litre naturally aspirated 77kW/138Nm engine can be when you drive it with one eye on the fuel gauge.

We worked out a 326 km open road trip from Randburg to Magalies Canopy Tours on the other side of Buffelspoort Dam via OR Tambo International Airport and back to Randburg again. The chosen route consisted mainly of freeways, with the N1 north, N3 south, R21 north and N4 west and east making up around 80%.

On board there were three adults and two primary school children with one heavy suitcase for the first 52 km to the airport, after which the load became one adult and suitcase lighter for the rest of the 274 km. All in all, it was a very realistic average load for typical South African road trip on any given day.

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Also, we did not do overly silly things to try and post an unrealistic number as this was not the point of the exercise. We wanted to use a real world scenario to try and figure out what is achievable in the Vitara Brezza.

What we did do was refrain was speeding and working the engine too hard during acceleration. We never once drove faster than 120 km/h and set the cruise control to 110 km/h for most of the time on the freeways. At that speed, the Vitara Brezza was comfortably cruising at 2 500 rpm despite the fact that it only has a four-speed automatic gearbox.

The air-conditioner was also on for most of the trip, with keeping some padkos cold in the upper glove box of utmost importance for the occupants’ spirits.

Instrument cluster made the news known.

When we pulled into our Jozi base late in the afternoon, the end result was astounding: 326.1 km covered using only 5.4 L/100 km. That works out to 18.5 km per litre of petrol, which means the fuel bill for the entire trip was only R298. It doesn’t matter how you look at it, that is excellent for a comfortable and spacious compact SUV.

While exercising the amount of patience we did behind the steering wheel is not everyone’s idea of fun, saving at the pump most definitely is. And come to think about it, it is quite remarkable how many other cars we still passed on this trip even when going about our business in what felt like a bit of a Miss Daisy-like manner.

But there is an even better part to not threatening the national speed limit than saving on a fuel bill… never getting a speeding fine!