Let's cut straight to the picnic table in the boot. You don't often see one of those. Not one with legs and everything. Certainly not in a small car. But Suzuki - responding to what must have been an extraordinarily specific piece of market research, or perhaps one using focus groups who were hungry at the time - has put a picnic table in the boot of the new Ignis.
It's under the floor and, yes, it looks more like a plastic box at first sight. But it lifts out and you can ask your dealer to supply legs. And then you can go about the place, confident that, as a driver, you will never again need to eat sandwiches off the ground in the lifetime of your Ignis.
The pull-out picnic table is very Suzuki - kind of useful, but also a bit barking at the edges. This, remember, is the company that brought us hordes of road-burning motorcycles and the quad bike. According to a Suzuki publication - The Corporation and the People, a glossy but extremely thorough document which takes the trouble to incorporate colour photographs of, among other things, the company's incinerator and its sludge recycling facility - the Suzuki philosophy, in a Japanese nutshell, is "value-packed products". Well, say what you like, but here is a car which costs less than £7,000 for a bottom-of-the-range three-door model and which comes with removable garden furniture as standard. Value-packed or what?
The Ignis looks like a Fiat Punto after two years of military service. Where cars are concerned, military service is all the rage. A surprisingly large portion of the new car market goes for inspiration to the Jeep or, in the case of some of the bigger Mitsubishis and Hyundais, to the amphibious personnel carrier - anything, really, which might have seen action in Korea. It's an arresting fact about transport in our time that, however ostensibly peaceful their ambitions as drivers, many people now expect their vehicles to look combat-ready.
Suzuki's bold but plausible plan with the Ignis seems to be to try to shrink-wrap this cultural tendency around the chassis of a small car. It looks like a Grand Vitara (Suzuki's chunkiest and most bellicose people carrier) which has accidentally been put in with the hot wash and has come out a third of the size.
As with any miniaturising - except, possibly, the shrinking of human heads by cannibals - a degree of cuteness inevitably sets in. Suppressing the urge to whistle the theme from Postman Pat every time I climbed into the Ignis was a perpetual struggle. The luggage bars on the roof could almost be handles. The Ignis appears, disconcertingly, to be the die-cast model of the car, rather than the real car itself - a Dinky collectible.
Would you give it shelf-room? Well, it's likably snub-nosed at the front, pleasantly anonymous at the back, and sensibly frippery-free. There is, for instance, no remote locking device, so owners will have to refamiliarise themselves with an ancient and valuable ritual, little practised these days, known as "putting the key in the door and unlocking the car yourself". It feels oddly unnecessary at first, but one soon gets the hang of it.
The interior is, inevitably within this price range, a small homage to functional grey plastic and serviceable cloth. Holders for drinks are moulded into the shelf under the dashboard, which may not be the most sensible use of limited space, given the amount of times one has to find space for drinks in a car compared with the amount of times one has to find space for things which aren't drinks. And in any case, you would have thought that those who would gorge and water themselves while driving were already amply provided for with the picnic table.
It's a peculiarly slippery car to drive. Strictly speaking, a 1.3-litre engine could pull two cars of this weight without complaining too much. As the Ignis's engine is merely obliged to deal with one, and hooked up to power steering, it shoots off towards the horizon almost of its own volition. You're somewhere up around 45mph even before you have got out of second. And anyone who makes it to fifth in an Ignis in an urban area is surely within minutes of being pulled over and breathalysed.
Suzuki is about to launch a competition rally model of the three-door Ignis. Doubtless the rally drivers will work out what to do about the suspension. The company speaks lyrically about the 6.5-inch clearance between the road and the bottom of the Ignis (offering greater clearance, apparently, than any other car in the class) but even so, I'm not sure exactly how durable the standard road model would prove in extreme circumstances. At one point, seeking a potential picnic-table opportunity on one of the wilder roads around Barnes Common in London, I hit an open drain. The jolt was so severe that I have yet to recover fully the sense of feeling in my upper body.
Better with the Ignis, I think, to stay close to smooth roads and well-lit places. And forget about going to war. It's only a little car, after all.
The lowdown
Suzuki Ignis 1.3 GL
Price: from £6,995
Top speed: 99.4mph
Maximum torque: 110Nm @ 5,500 rpm
Consumption: 44.14mpg
At the wheel: Ken or Barbie
On the stereo: Livin' Doll
En route for: Legoland
