Japanese small-car specialist halts orders for three-door auto until supplies catch up with demand
Suzuki Australia has stopped selling the Suzuki Jimny 3-Door automatic as of today (January 19), until it reduces the backlog of thousands of existing orders that will force some customers to wait up to 18 months for the most popular Jimny variant.
The Japanese small-car brand yesterday advised its local dealer network to stop taking Jimny 3-Door auto orders and said it would advise customers via its public website that the Jimny auto is sold out and unavailable to order until further notice.
The move was pre-empted by Suzuki Australia managing director Michael Pachota last week, when he told carsales that demand for the Jimny auto exceeded supply by such a degree that new orders could soon be halted.
More than three years after the new-generation model’s local launch in 2019, Suzuki Australia currently holds over 3000 backorders for the Jimny, which found almost 5700 Aussie homes last year (up 70% on 2021) and helped Suzuki Australia post its best sales year since 2013 with 21,578 total sales.
“[Jimny] manuals are easier to come by versus automatics, so we have a much bigger back-order for autos,” said Pachota last week.
“We’re still in a huge back-order situation with over 3000 orders still pending. And the orders keep rising as a lot more new customers are coming to Suzuki.
“Right now we have about 80 per cent auto, 20 per cent manual [orders]. We have some people waiting out to a year and a half, so we’re considering whether we should pause the order list.”
Manual-only LITE and GLX manual variants of the pint-size retro off-roader are unaffected by the stop-sale, but supplies of all Suzuki Jimny vehicles with two-tone paint are also in short supply and Suzuki has urged its dealers to encourage customers to switch to a solid colour to expediate delivery.
The news comes just days after the reveal of the first ever Suzuki Jimny 5-Door, which is now available for reservations and is expected to be even more popular than the three-door – despite a higher price tag – when it arrives in Australia early next year.
Suzuki Jimny 5-door
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Keyword: Suzuki Jimny stop-sale announced