Jimny manual tips and tricks

Gearing

I go into significant detail in my gearing article, but here’s the basic chart showing engine and road speeds for different gears for high range for a stock manual Jimny:

And, yes, that is correct: at the open highway limit of 110 km/h in Australia you are spinning at 3444 rpm in 5th gear. Before you ask: no, they don’t get more efficient if you sit at lower revs, since the overall gearing is pretty much optimised for the Jimny’s little engine.

Maximum downshift speeds

This is direct from Suzuki and the Jimny’s factory owners manual, so don’t blame me for what it says.

2H, 4H

4L

I find it hard to engage a gear at standstill?

Some people report challenges getting the Jimny to engage a gear from neutral when they’re at a standstill. It’s a very basic manual gearbox internally, and with the type of selectors it has you might find you just need to do a little tweak to get it to engage a gear.

If you’re struggling to engage reverse: try putting the car into 2nd (ideally) or 1st gear. I’ve not bothered to check internally which gear it engages reverse onto, I think it’s 2nd, but that end of the gear cluster internally can be lined up to make it easier to grab reverse simply by first getting 1st or 2nd. Reverse does have a synchroniser/brake on it to help it slot in but there’s only so much it can do to try to flick the gear around to line up with the countershaft.

There is a slight exception to this: if you have been on the highway at speed and you pull up with the car still in 5th gear, reverse is locked out until you first go to the neutral position. This is done so you can’t accidentally go from 5th into reverse when at speed, you first actively have to return the gear lever to the neutral position before it’ll let you engage reverse.

If you’re struggling to engage 1st, especially if you’ve come to a stop from speed in a higher gear, you can help line things up by getting a different gear. 2nd is going to be the most help, but often if you can’t select 1st at a standstill then 2nd won’t be ‘gettable’ either. In that case, I usually just slot it straight up from neutral into 3rd and then it’ll slot straight over into first.

The other strategy is just to release the clutch, with the gearbox in neutral, for a couple of seconds. That spins the input of the gearbox and helps line it all up internally. If the other trick of grabbing a slightly different gear doesn’t help, then usually a couple of seconds with the clutch pedal released and the gearbox in neutral will do it.