Daihatsu Sonica

The Daihatsu Sonica is one of 112 Daihatsu models in the MotorJury library, the catalogue that sets out to hold every car ever made — production, prototype and concept alike. The record places its introduction in 2006. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Daihatsu Sonica properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 2000s were the decade of electronics — stability control, dual-clutch gearboxes and the first serious hybrids arrived while platform-sharing consolidated the industry into a handful of giants. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Nissan Nissan Qashqai, the Audi AG Audi R8, the Nissan Nissan GT-R — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Daihatsu Sonica reads like this: the record lists its engine as Petrol engine / Petrol: / 658 cc Daihatsu K-series engine#KF / KF-DET Turbocharger / turbo Straight-three engine / I3; quoted output is 47 kW; kerb weight is recorded at 820 –; drive goes through CVT; the layout is Front-engine, front-wheel-drive / Front-engine, four-wheel-drive. Worked together, those figures give roughly 57 horsepower per tonne — the single number that says more about how a car actually moves than any of its parts alone. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Daihatsu story

Within Daihatsu's own catalogue the Daihatsu Sonica sits alongside the Daihatsu Applause, the Daihatsu Atrai, the Daihatsu Atrai 7, the Daihatsu Ayla. The record names the Daihatsu Max as its predecessor and the Daihatsu Cast Sport as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Morinobu Okano and Takahiko Koyama. Assembly is recorded at Japan: Nakatsu, Ōita (Daihatsu Motor Kyushu).

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

From catalogue to ownership

What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Daihatsu Sonica costs to live with — that is a different dataset. MotorJury's ownership verdicts are computed from federal complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, published per model year as the nightly ingest reaches each car. If this model was sold in the United States, its years will surface in the ownership database; browse it live or price any car yourself with the true-cost calculator.