Diahatsu Sirion (rental car review)
December 17th, 2007 by Tim Uden
I rented a Diahatsu Sirion from Avis at Wellington Airport for a week of driving around New Zealand’s North Island.
It has a high driving position and is a nice zippy car for city driving, but it has some flaws that affect its performance in some driving conditions.
Like the Diahatsu Terrios, which I normally drive at home, it accelerates slowly (or as Jeremy Clarkson would say, “with most cars you measure accleration with a stopwatch, but with this you need a calendar”), it is sluggish climbing steep hills and it is unstable on tight corners. They both have a 1.3 litre engine, so you would expect the larger Terrios to be a bit sluggish, but the smaller and lighter Sirion really should do fine with a 1.3 litre motor.
It is usually lots of fun driving a small manual hatchback on winding roads, but each time you take a corner the Sirion car feels like it will roll over so you have to really slow down on each corner (at least until you get a good feel for the car), but at least going uphill you don’t pick up enough speed to need to slow down.
Despite its drawbacks, I still like the Sirion. I wouldn’t buy one and if a competing rental company offered something nicer I would probably rent that instead, but I would still be happy driving one around.
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