The Suzuki Cappuccino Is an Ultra-Tiny, Quirky JDM Sports Car

this is a 1992 suzuki cappuccino and it's a little tiny japanese sports car that was never sold here in the united states it has a turbo three cylinder engine an absolutely bizarre roof situation and it's about half as long as a full-size pickup truck and today i'm going to review it before i get started big news this suzuki cappuccino is currently for sale being auctioned live on cars and bids which is my enthusiast car auction website this cappuccino has some nice little upgrades it shows low mileage and it already has a us title and now it's on cars and bids so once you finish watching this video click the link in the description below to head over to cars and bids where you can bid on this cappuccino and buy it only on cars and bids so let's talk cappuccino this is a k-car which is a japanese car classification intended to incentivize people to buy tiny little cars to fit into big crowded compact cities now most k cars are square-shaped hatchbacks aimed at using every possible inch of the regulation to fit in to the k-car requirements but the cappuccino is unusual because it's a k-car sports car the result is that it's not very powerful although it's balanced out because it's insanely small and as you can imagine it is quite quirky as well so today i'm going to show you all of that first i'll take you on a thorough tour of the cappuccino and show you all of its interesting quirks and features then i'll get it out on the road and drive it and then i'll give it a dug score all right i'm going to start the quirks and features of the cappuccino with its roof which is very quirky and interesting right now you can see this car is in its full convertible configuration nice open top motoring but there are three different roof configurations that you can drive around in one is a targa configuration all you gotta do is slide this rear roof panel forward and you can see it clips into place and now we have a target top so you have a rear window that is actually glass with defroster lines in it not just some plastic one and you have a real targa top so if it's like sunny out but a little cooler this could be your driving position but you can also go full coupe if you want to because this car comes with removable roof panels for the targa roof the roof above the seats now amazingly there are three different targa roof panels despite the incredibly tiny size of this car every other target i've ever been in has had either one or two panels but this tiny little car has three and the way you get them on is first you put the middle panel into place and then it has these little clips and it clips in so it stays in place and then you put either of the two side panels on the left the right doesn't really matter and then all three panels are clipped into place they're stuck on there and now you have a coupe a fixed roof coupe that you can drive around and turn on the heat and actually use in cold weather so this car is really an all-weather type of vehicle it's a pretty cool situation now if you want to go back to the targa configuration obviously you just unlatch the roof panels you gotta start with one of the side ones you pull it off and then you can pull off the other side one or the middle one and they all come off and that is when you discover the reason why this little car has three roof panels because by doing three panels they can fit into the tiny trunk if it was just two panels they'd be too large but three splits them up enough that they can get back there now when these cappuccino models were sold new they came with a bag that would store the panels that would fit snugly into the trunk this car lost its bag somewhere in its life and frankly i have kind of a hard time believing you can really finagle all three panels into this tiny little trunk but apparently it's possible so you can keep them with you in case of a sudden rainstorm now at that point obviously you're back in the targa configuration and if you want to go full convertible that's pretty easy you have this little red switch in the center between the seats if you push that in the direction of this arrow it unlocks this little panel above pull that up and then you can release the top push it back and then you're back in full convertible mode so that's the unusual and bizarre top situation in the cappuccino but anyway after the top the next craziest quirk about this car is just how incredibly tiny it is this car is only 129.7 inches long unbelievably short in length in fact it's about four and a half feet shorter than a bmw 3 series think about that for a second this car is ridiculously small and frankly its weight maybe is even crazier 1600 pounds curb weight for this car meaning it weighs less than half of a normal modern car this thing is just so incredibly tiny now the reason for all of this is to fit into the japanese k-car classification like i mentioned earlier this is a governmental vehicle classification in japan aimed at incentivizing people to buy really small tiny cars so that cities aren't taken up by bigger ones now you can still buy larger cars in japan than k cars you're not mandated to get something this small but there are some real government incentives that go along with buying these tiny k cars and so a lot of people in japan especially in bigger cities do just that now like i mentioned earlier most k cars were hatchbacks square-shaped in order to fit every inch into the k-car classification but there were some k-car sports cars and they were especially prevalent in the early 1990s they were called the abc cars the autosam az-1 which i've already reviewed the honda beat which i plan on reviewing soon and this the suzuki cappuccino soap az one beat and cappuccino abc now these cars all came out in the early 1990s and then the japanese economy went into a pretty severe recession for a pretty long period of time and there weren't really any more k-car sports cars until recently you had the daihatsu kopen in the early 2000's and more recently the honda s660 but otherwise k-car sports cars are quite rare and they are very special but anyway next up i want to talk through the interior quirks and features of the cappuccino starting with getting in which isn't particularly easy for someone my height six foot three six foot four it's hard to get into a car like this all of the k cars are pretty challenging this one actually makes it a little easier because the roof can come off and with the roof off i can just slide myself in behind the steering wheel get in and close the door although it is incredibly tight in this interior and rather difficult to do this carb is definitely not made for people my height but anyway once you do fold yourself into this car you will find a fairly straightforward interior that doesn't really have that many quirks mainly because there's not really room to put that many quirks in here i'm going to start sort of the back between the seats where you have the dome light although there's no dome in this car so it's down here you can see the usual switch letting you turn it on or set it to go on with the doors that's your dome light in the cappuccino now next to that you have the center console storage area which you can see has a little key lock on it that's kind of unusual because this car actually does have a glove box and it also has a little key lock on it so you have two locking storage areas inside this car which is a little strange but it's so tiny and it's so open that the more storage and lockable storage the better so that's nice to see now the interesting thing about this center console storage area is it opens the wrong way it opens away from the driver so the driver opens and the lid actually blocks access to get into this storage area but at least it's there which is better than nothing now one other interesting thing about the storage area is you can see the fuel door release is included in this storage area kind of an odd placement for it but that's where it is if you want to pop open the fuel door in this car now speaking of storage in this interior worth noting in addition to the glove box and the center console you also have this storage panel behind the seats this panel here is not used even when the roof is all the way down or obviously up this panel is always empty so you can throw more stuff back here to store it which is nice to have in this tiny car a little bit of extra interior storage now one interesting thing about this car is it does have some nice luxury touches in addition to that multi-stage top situation you also have power windows you can see the switches right here in the center push them up down power windows go up down that is nice to have you also have air conditioning in here which is kind of a surprise a lot of cars in this era in japan didn't have air conditioning at all especially convertibles but this one does although i imagine running the air conditioning really saps the power since this wasn't a particularly powerful car even when you didn't have the ac running now you can also see here in the center console that we have a manual transmission this is a five speed manual and it's not really surprising to see a manual on a sporty car from japan from this era although this car was also offered with an automatic if you wanted now it wasn't available initially this car was sold from 91 to 98 and the automatic didn't show up until 95 and it's exceptionally rare because like i mentioned japan went into a recession soon after this car came out and 88 of cappuccino sales were in the first two model years 91 and 92 like this car so the vast majority are early models before there was even an automatic offered and the automatic came later and probably wasn't that common so i suspect auto versions are especially rare but this one has the manual that's what you want anyway in a car like this but anyway next up let's talk gauge cluster you can see the tachometer is in the center like a true sports car because that's what you're focusing on on the race track and you can also see it's pretty exceptional 8 500 rpm redline and the tech goes all the way to 12 000 rpm so you look at that you think wow this is a really serious performance car but then you look over at the speedometer and you see it only goes up to 140 kilometers per hour which is roughly 87 miles per hour so then you realize no no it is actually it isn't a true sports car at all but anyway speaking of performance let's talk about that for a second i'm obviously up here with the engine but before i get to it let's talk about accessing the engine compartment the latch is nowhere to be found in the driver's foot well in fact it's nowhere to be found in the passenger foot well either i was very confused couldn't figure it out it's in the glove box you open up the glove box pull on this latch and that unlatches the hood and then you can access the engine in this car very unusual placement for the hood release but anyway here is the powertrain this is a turbocharged three cylinder about 650cc so 0.6 0.7 liter turbo 3 cylinder and when this car was new it made about 63 horsepower not a huge number not a huge size but it's all meant to fit into those k-car classifications and regulations now you can see that this powertrain has been modified a little bit and in fact it's been modified more than i usually like for cars that i review but these suzuki cappuccinos are just so hard to find and they're hard to find unmodified after all these years and so i gotta take what i can get when it comes to these cars now as for the layout this is a front engine car obviously as you can see but the tiny little engine is pushed back just far enough that it i guess would technically qualify as front mid engine regardless of that technicality it is pretty far back here for weight distribution which is probably pretty nice weight distribution is especially important on a tiny little car like this where little placements of small objects can really affect the balance and the way the car feels on the road now this car is also rear-wheel drive so front engine rear-wheel drive like a true sports car should be it just happened to only have 63 horsepower not exactly a sports car figure but anyway since i'm up here i want to talk about a few interesting quirks up front one of which is the grill this tiny little thing between the headlights this car is scaled down compared to a normal car and so i love that the grill is scaled down also now of course there is a lower grill below the bumper but don't ruin my fun i love this tiny little grill on this tiny little car and everything is scaled down in here the climate vents are incredibly small so you have air conditioning and heating but it comes out through these very very small vents i guess that's all you need for this incredibly tiny interior you also only have one windshield washer jet you can see here most cars have two some have three but this thing only has one and frankly it probably only needs one because it's just so tiny i love how everything is scaled down in this car now speaking of the small size one especially interesting thing about the cappuccino is it was sold in europe pretty much no other k cars are sold outside japan because the sizing is so tiny that it really doesn't work for other markets but there was some demand for this car in europe because it's a cute little sports car people wanted to try it so suzuki did a small production run in europe in the early 90s for the cappuccino so not all of these were only sold in japan now on the subject of this car's incredibly small size the other thing that's exceptionally small is the cargo area i showed you before a little bit with the roof but let's take a closer look at the trunk of the cappuccino you can see it really is very tiny in here not much room for pretty much anything although you do have a spare tire back here the bright yellow spare of shame that makes you want to get it changed out as quickly as possible you also have some tools back here they're fitted in this styrofoam container around the spare tire which could come in nice and handy if you have to do a roadside tire change or some other repairs in your tiny little car simple tools but there's not much that can break in here so that's pretty much your whole cargo area in the cappuccino and by the way speaking of the rear of the cappuccino i absolutely love the reverse light you can see the turn signal and brake light are integrated into this housing which was clearly designed for this car but the reverse light almost looks like it was an afterthought they had forgotten about it and they just stuck it on below the rear bumper down here it's kind of funny to see it there it really looks like it was completely forgotten and they stuck it on like oh we gotta put this on to sell the car so they did and since i'm out here talking about the exterior of the cappuccino let's talk styling i gotta say this is a very cute little car it almost looks like kind of a scaled-down miata it has a real appeal to its design it's attractive well-proportioned it looks really neat and really exciting and i can understand why there was demand for this car in europe people wanted this cute little sports car and i don't blame them these are now becoming legal to import to the united states and there's pretty big demand here i think in part because of the way it looks and of course front engine rear wheel drive it really does seem like kind of a scaled down miata and almost maybe better looking than the na miata if i may say so and so those are the quirks and features of the suzuki cappuccino now it's time to get it out on the road and see how it drives all right driving the cappuccino i've wanted to drive this car for so so so long and i'm so excited about this now this car is like i mentioned earlier it's more modified than a lot of the cars that i usually review and frankly it's not in perfect shape either there's holes in the dash and some other stuff but it's just so damn hard to find a cappuccino especially here in california where registering it can be a real pain so let's talk driving experience now even with the modifications to this car i can't imagine that horsepower is more than i don't know 80. it was a slow car to begin with and they've tried to make it faster and it is faster but not dramatically so however it is so much fun now one of the most obvious modifications is the car is loud someone put some exhaust on this thing to really liven up the three cylinder and it works and it really is a loud exhaust but even with that noise the car is still not really all that fast however it's pretty quick it's certainly quicker than it probably felt back when it was new suzuki was quoting a 0-60 time of in the mid to high eight second range and everybody said that that was optimistic although i think now it's probably around that area um again not all that fast but when your car when your car only weighs 1600 pounds you know it feels fast like we're low there's wind blowing all around us with this little car you feel the road and it actually ends up feeling pretty quick the fun of these cars really is the slow car fast thing like you can really push this you can really ring it out all the way to that 12 000 rpm maximum and you can have fun with this car and i think that that's a really really cool thing about it now i want to talk about fitting in this car i reviewed the autozam az-1 which was one of the other abc cars and i barely fit into that it was really really tight this car i fit not really a problem my knees are kind of up against the dash but other than that it's okay with the roof off if the roof was in place i'm not really sure if it would be quite so easy i'm not a big modified car guy but this car was surely so slow back when it was new that the modifications to it have actually made it kind of this is an exciting little car to drive around in it's actually pretty fun certainly more fun than i was expecting uh given the numbers and what you see on paper i like the gear lever shift action in this car it's easy to rev match the clutch actually everything revs up really quickly in this car surprisingly so if you want to go for a rev match there's no like lazy flywheel clutch action it revs fast and steering is nice and easily connected that's one of the cool things about this car the steering and handling is excellent because it's so small the car is just there's not that much to move around everything is low everything is little and so it really feels like you're in a tiny little car that changes directions quickly people overuse the cliche oh it feels like a go-kart but this thing at 129 inches long feels like a go-cart i have a review coming up of the honda beat which was the other k-car sports car of this era and i will say this of the three the az-1 the beat and this this is the most fun uh at least of the three that i've driven now it may not feel this way without the modifications but this is the most fun and i say that because the az-1 was an amazingly good drive felt so cool mid-engine but it was so tight in that interior even like normal height people shorter than me had trouble getting in and driving that car it was just compromised but it was the better drive if you could fit the beat is also a great drive and it's fun but it's not quite as like energetic and peppy and as exciting as this car this one just feels more fun um with its turbo engine and obviously the mods health and the convertible and it's just cool i think this car is a fun little eager car and i do agree that it feels almost like a three-quarter size miata if you want an a miata but you think that's too big and bulky well this is a pretty good option and so that's the suzuki cappuccino tiny not very fast but very fun and very quirky and now you can buy it on cars and bids anyway now it's time to give this cappuccino a doug score and the dug score is here 46 out of 100 which places the cappuccino here against other very tiny sporty cars the cappuccino scores one point above the autozam az-1 the az-1 is a bit more exciting and thrilling both based on its steering and handling and its crazy doors but the cappuccino is more usable and the convertible top contributes to its appeal plus this one's modifications do a nice job of livening it up overall both the az-1 and the cappuccino are fun little sports cars if you can fit inside [Music] you

Channel: Doug DeMuro

Views: 725,410

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Id: t2nN9VUy-Tk

Length: 20min 41sec (1241 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 24 2022