Long-term report: Our Suzuki Swace loves trips to Ikea

The Swace is such a roomy and efficient estate it means plenty of spare cash is being spent on ‘home improvements’

It’s a bit of a running joke that motoring journalists only ever take estate cars to Ikea or the tip. Recently, I’ve only been guilty of one of those things.

As soon as my other half discovered that I would be living with an estate car for six months, a ‘jobs list’ of things that we needed to do appeared on the kitchen fridge. Top of that list was a trip to the famous Swedish purveyor of everything.

I loathe trips like these because what starts out as ‘oh, we just need some new towels’, ends up with us buying half of the items displayed in the ‘Market Hall’.

We’ve all been in this situation. The trolley being packed every higher, heated exchanges involving sentences such as ‘we don’t need this’, and the slow walk back to the car knowing that none of the items you’ve been told ‘aren’t these lovely’ will fit in the car.

A visit to our local Ikea recently went exactly like this, apart from the last bit. Amazingly, despite buying armfuls of stuff we didn’t need… sorry, home essentials, the Swace’s boot was more than large enough. At this point you might think, ‘well of course it was’, but honestly I was surprised.

The Swace is based on the Toyota Corolla Sports Tourer and it’s one of the larger small estate cars on sale. To be specific, there are 596 litres of space back there, and with the seats folded that swells to 1,232 litres.

But numbers are one thing – what pleases me are the little details. Those seat backs, for instance, fold down completely flat, and there are handles on the sides of the boot meaning you don’t have to lean too far in to unlatch the seats.

The Swace swallowed our Ikea ‘bargains’ (not my words) so well that my other half said we might as well drive round to John Lewis ‘while we’re here’ to buy that new television we’d been putting off.

With the 50-inch TV bought – oh yes, we pushed the boat out – it was time to load it in the Swace. This time it was a slight squeeze but nothing that a good reorder of the boot could fix. It was at this point I noticed how well-lit the boot was.

Well lit, you say? Yes. You see, I don’t normally notice how good the interior lighting is in a car’s boot, but I did in the dark John Lewis car park. Unlike some cars that have one stingy light in the boot, the Swace has a strip of LEDs on each side under the window line, bathing the boot in super bright light. Perhaps I do notice the quality of boot lighting more than I thought I did.

Aside from being amazed at the Swace’s illuminations, I’m really enjoying driving it. I’ll go into more depth on how the Swace drives in a future report, but what I will say now is that the car is delivering some outstanding fuel economy figures.

Suzuki claims around 62mpg and I’m regularly achieving that – sometimes it’s even higher on small journeys where I can maximise the time spent in EV mode. The Swace is a conventional hybrid – a ‘self-charging’ hybrid, it’s sometimes referred to as – so it has a tiny battery and a small EV range. But around town and perhaps on trips to the supermarket, which is around five miles away, I can do 80% of the journey on electric power.

All of this fuel saving is doing great things to my wallet. So much so it’s leaving me more money to spend in Ikea.