Junkyard Find: 2004 Suzuki Aerio
Not many cars appear and disappear while leaving as little trace as did the Suzuki Aerio, which was sold in the United States for the 2002-2007 model years. Normally, I ignore such new cars when I’m wandering around the wrecking yards of Denver, but I’ll break out the camera when I find something of historical significance— for example, an example of the final year of the GM J-body’s 24-year run— or when I see a car that doesn’t seem to exist on the street any more. This Aerio is such a car.
The car used for the first seven years of Top Gear UK’s “Star In a Reasonably Priced Car” series was a 2002 Suzuki Aerio (called the Liana, which was supposedly an acronym for “Life In A New Age,” in Europe). This is the only Aerio most of us have ever seen.
American car shoppers ran out of reasons to buy Suzuki cars, though Chinese buyers can still get a new Liana.
Will anyone pull any pieces off this car before it gets eaten by The Crusher? Probably not.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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You know, I actually wanted to buy one of these back around 2003. But the purchase price plus not-so-good fuel economy was such that I never even took it for a test drive. The same thing happened in 2007 when I ended up buying a Scion xB. The Aerio was dead by then, but the fuel mileage on the rest of the Suzuki line-up was so terrible that it wasn't worth the cost of entry.
Man these sure didn't last very long did they?! I remember seeing the kinda cool commercials for these when they came out. Then I saw one in the wild and thought how ugly and terrible they looked. Almost born hoopties, my neighbor had a yellow one and it was already falling apart at a year old. Heh. These will be totally forgotten in a few years.