Guilty pleasure: Suzuki X-90

90s cars Suzuki

Short of donning a Union Jack mini dress and giving itself a ‘Rachel’ ’do, the Suzuki X-90 couldn’t be more nineties if it tried. It’s a raspberry and sunset flannel shirt on wheels. Forget a T-top, the X-90 is a crop top with teal compact trousers. There should be a tummy button bar and not a Suzuki badge in the centre of the grille.

There were more than a few belly laughs when Suzuki unveiled the X-90 as a concept alongside the EE-10 Experimental Hybrid Citycar at the 1993 Tokyo motor show. Both were wearing three-spoke alloys – that other must-have accessory in the nineties – but only one would make production. The EE-10 deserved better. Its ‘face’ had the look of a robot that was just happy to be out in public, while any car with half-enclosed rear wheels, centre exhaust, notchback derrière Subaru SVX-style side windows gets a free pass at Petrolblog. It’s the hybrid future we could have had.

Instead, we got the X-90, a car Suzuki said it designed for the ‘expressive American youth market’. Sadly, there weren’t enough expressive American youths to go round, so the Vitara-based X-90 died a quick and horrible death in the country it was created to conquer. Just 7205 were sold there between 1996 and 1998, although production stopped in 1997.

One of the press ads asked a very simple question: ‘What are you staring at?’ It was hard to say, but the supporting copy is best read in the style of Michael Stipe signing the first chorus of It’s The End Of The World As We Know It.

‘This not exactly the same old same old. It’s the Suzuki X-90. As in Xceptional. Xciting. Xtreme. As in two-seater 4x4 T-top, things which have never been combined in the same sentence before, let alone put on wheels, let alone coupled with dual airbags 4-wheel anti-lock brakes, power steering and a gutsy 16-valve engine. It’s fun to a factor of X. It’s on-road, off-road, uptown and downtown. It has everything you want, and it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. So if you were wondering how to have a little more fun in the 90s, it could be that the answer’s right here. Staring you right in the face.’

And breathe.

What a shame more people weren’t feeling pretty psyched about Suzuki’s bright light. If we continue to give people what they think they want based on what they know, rather than experimenting – should that be Xperimenting? – with new ideas, the car industry would plateau. For every BMC Mini, Renault Espace and Citroën DS, there’s a GM EV1, Renault Avantime and Suzuki X-90. Not every idea sticks, but three decades on from its debut as a concept car, the X-90 makes more sense than ever. A high-riding, inexpensive, relatively fuel-efficient two-seater that doesn’t take up a lot of room on the road – a car for our times? The lifestyle SUV market was still in its infancy when the X-90 tried to carve out a niche within a niche, so it was arguably doomed from the start.

At its peak, there were around 1200 X-90s blazing a trail for two-seater T-top SUVs in the UK, around half of which had selectable 4WD, rather than the all-mouth-and-no-combat-trousers 2WD. You need only look at the success of the X-90 in Trials as evidence of the car’s off-road capabilities. As a well-known producer of energy drinks proved before the brand defected to MINI, it was also handy as a promo vehicle. X-90 sales never took flight, but at least Red Bull gave it wings.

This article first appeared in issue 19 of Classic.Retro.Modern. magazine.