Junkyard Find: 2004 Suzuki Aerio

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

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
Murilee Martin

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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  • Racin_G73 Racin_G73 on Apr 23, 2013

    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.

  • Stereorobb Stereorobb on Sep 19, 2013

    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.

  • Wolfwagen Is it me or have auto shows just turned to meh? To me, there isn't much excitement anymore. it's like we have hit a second malaise era. Every new vehicle is some cookie-cutter CUV. No cutting-edge designs. No talk of any great powertrains, or technological achievements. It's sort of expected with the push to EVs but there is no news on that front either. No new battery tech, no new charging tech. Nothing.
  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.
  • FormerFF We bought three new and one used car last year, so we won't be visiting any showrooms this year unless a meteor hits one of them. Sorry to hear that Mini has terminated the manual transmission, a Mini could be a fun car to drive with a stick.It appears that 2025 is going to see a significant decrease in the number of models that can be had with a stick. The used car we bought is a Mk 7 GTI with a six speed manual, and my younger daughter and I are enjoying it quite a lot. We'll be hanging on to it for many years.
  • Oberkanone Where is the value here? Magna is assembling the vehicles. The IP is not novel. Just buy the IP at bankruptcy stage for next to nothing.
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