The Suzuki Baleno is a 5-door hatchback from Suzuki, built from 2015, as electrification stopped being an experiment and the crossover took every market. Under the bonnet: Petrol engine. Yoshio Takeuchi (pre-facelift) / Takashi Maeda (facelift) / Kikako Kaneko (RS facelift) drew it.
Where it came from
The Suzuki Baleno (Japanese: スズキ・バレーノ, Hepburn: Suzuki Barēno) is a subcompact car produced by the Japanese manufacturer Suzuki in India and some other countries since September 2015 with a hatchback body style. Prior to this, the "Baleno" nameplate had been applied to the Cultus Crescent in numerous markets and also for sedan version of Aerio and SX4 in Indonesia.
Unlike the previous generations of Baleno when it was offered as a sedan, wagon, or a 3-door hatchback, the model sold since 2015 is exclusively offered as a 5-door hatchback. Since June 2019, it is also marketed at Toyota dealerships in India as the Toyota Glanza, and since September 2020 in several African countries as the Toyota Starlet. The word "baleno" means "lightning" in Italian.
Under the skin
Power comes from Petrol engine; other versions carried different engines, listed in the specification table below. It weighs 865 -. It shifts through a 5-speed manual (all engines) / 4-speed automatic (K14B) / 6-speed automatic AWTF-80 SC (K10C) / Continuously variable transmission / CVT (K12C/M). The layout matters: the engine drives the front wheels, the packaging choice that gives a small car a big cabin. The wheelbase is 2520 mm. These are manufacturer figures carried by Wikipedia and Wikidata, not road-test measurements.
In context
Its family tree is legible: it took over from the Suzuki Swift#AZG / Suzuki Swift (Indonesia) / Toyota Etios hatchback (Glanza/Starlet) / Toyota Yaris (XP150) hatchback (Starlet, South Africa); assembly was at Manesar. Its contemporaries in the catalogue — the Ferrari 488, the Ford Escort, the Chevrolet Camaro — show what else the money bought that year. Nearby in the Suzuki catalogue sit the Suzuki XL-7 and the Suzuki Landy.