Car reviews

Introduction

The Sirion is one of the greenest cars of its age… although they're available in yellow and maroon as well! It was an attempt to offer something that's more fun, and you have to admit, the car does stand out. Considering its extremely low re-sale value, the Sirion is actually a lot of car for the money, especially for budding rally drivers.

Exterior & Interior

In the exterior of the Sirion you can find certain traits from the previous creations of ItalDesign studio. It is a weird mix of retro and modern and considering the limited canvas the Japanese designers had to work on (just 12 and a half feet) they've done a great job. It was intended as a young man's car and that's how it was accepted in Japan. In Britain we've got it slightly wrong and the Sirion is mainly driven by senior citizens.

The quirky exterior is not, unfortunately, matched by a similar style of the interior. It's not much different from the Charade ‐ same cheap materials used and very little design flair displayed. It almost feels as if they've spent too much money tweaking the exterior and run out of funds when it finally came to doing something about the interior. It has a shorter wheel base than the Charade and it tells ‐ although there's enough space at the front, the rear seats are crammed. The 235 litres of luggage space makes for a decent boot; and the tailgate is wide enough to load and unload without too much effort.

Drive

The car feels quite wobbly and it rolls a lot when negotiating bends. You shouldn't push your luck with the 4track and rally modifications. They're good for driving on muddy roads but there's simply not enough grip or cornering finesse to attempt serious rallying.

Although the 1.3-litre engine is perfectly capable of high speeds, driving far in a Sirion might be a rather uncomfortable experience, mainly due to the seating position, so motorway driving should probably be avoided.

For lazy people there is the Formula edition that… is as quick as an F1 sports car. No, of course it's not! The only thing that reminds you of the F1 is the funky paddle gear shift ‐ quite a convenient way of manipulating your automatic gearbox.

Faults & Repairs

You can check a review of any Daihatsu model and the "repairs" sections will look pretty much the same. This is mainly due to the Daihatsu engineers being stubbornly reluctant to sort their suspension out. History repeats with the Sirion ‐ its weakest link is the suspension. It is too small for the car and it is prone to excessive wear because it has to deliver more than it was designed for. The overall reliability, however, is as good as with any old Daihatsu. Underneath the flashy shell of the Sirion, there's a very basic technology that has little changed since the 1970s. It is relatively cheap to drive and maintain a Daihatsu Sirion.