Uncategorized RoadWhinge on 13 Apr 2007 12:19 pm
Amphibious Suzukis
Although I spend quite a lot of time here, banging on about cars and driving, I neither particularly like cars, nor know much about them. That is why I didn’t really have a clue why one Suzuki Jimny I saw had a strange pipe that stuck up along one side of the front windscreen. That’s odd, I thought.
Anyway, I saw the same Jimny in a car park a few days later. The driver was at the pay and display machine as I got to it, so I asked him what the strange pipe was all about.
“Oh, that’s a snorkel,” he replied.
I bit my tongue. A number of smart-arse retorts died unspoken. Instead of pushing my luck, I just asked him what it did. He told me that it raises the air intake for the engine. Oh, I said, and asked what the benefit was. He explained that it was for “off-roading”.
I realised at this point that I was, essentially, none the wiser about what the point was. Still, he seemed happy enough to chat, so I persevered and asked him how it helped with off-road driving. Suddenly he seemed a little less certain. Well, he explained, it got the air intake up where water and dirt would be less likely to get in and bugger up the filter.
OK, now we were getting somewhere.
I asked how serious the problem with dirt and water in the air intake generally was. He said that it had never actually been a problem for him, even before having the snorkel fitted. I then asked if the snorkel meant that the car could drive through deep water without conking out. Again there was that subtle uncertainty, but he said that he reckoned it could. After a pause he said that he’d not been through deep enough water to really try it.
As a fellow Jimny owner I was really quite curious as to the amphibious potential of my car, so I thought I’d risk one more question. How deep had he tried.
Well, he said, just normal puddles, really. He’d never actually driven it off-road. His wife said he ruin the car and so it had just not happened.
He was clearly both embarrassed and saddened at the thought, so I thanked him for his time and went off to the bank.
When I got back his car had gone from the car park. I like to think he threw caution to the wind and headed straight for a dirt track - or even to a reservoir with the intention of a submarine trial…
Below is a hi-definition CGI reconstruction of what such a trial might look like.
