You know how I draw cars for Autopian members on their birthdays? Or close-ish to their birthdays? Well, I do and it’s just another perk of that incredible state of being we call Autopian Membership. Anyway, one of the ones I just did was a request for a Suzuki LJ20. I was aware of these before, in a vague way, but once I really started looking at them, I was hopelessly smitten.
The LJ series – which stood for Light Jeep, another reminder of how the term “jeep” was on the path to genericization, like Kleenex or Hoovering in the UK – was the start of the series that most of the world knows as the Jimny.
These early LJ series of Jimnys, introduced in 1970, seriously minimal. Jimnys have always been Kei-class, but back in 1970 that meant 360cc engines and under 10 feet of length. The early LJ10s had a two-stroke, two-cylinder air-cooled engine making 24 horsepower, good for 50 mph even with the off-road focused gearing. The thing only weighed 1290 pounds, after all.
Check out this great cowboy-inspired commercial from when they came out:
These two-stroke engines also had an oil injection system so you didn’t have to mix your oil and gas, like some sort of filthy animal. Later, Suzuki switched to a liquid-cooled engine for their LJ20, which got a power bump to a ravenous 28 hp.
Here’s a nice walkaround of one of those:
I suppose if anything, these Jimnys really showcase what a good design the basic original Bantam/Willys/Ford army Jeep was, because this is essentially a scaled-down version of that.
A little boxy tub on wheels, basically, with some seats and an engine bolted in. But it all just works! For moving two people and some cargo around rough terrain, it’s pretty hard to beat. Here, squint really hard at that picture up there and let’s see if we can see through it a bit:
Hey you did it! Great job! As you can see, it’s pretty straightforward Jeep-type engineering under there, ladder frame and leaf springs and solid axles, just all scaled down.
Suzuki’s brochures get pretty technical, including things like this diagram of the new liquid-cooling system for the LJ20. Look how tall that carb stands on an otherwise pretty compact and low engine!
Suzuki did get a little hyperbolic with some of their technical details, too. Like, sure, the CCI oil injecting system is great, but is it really “Epoch-making?” That feels a little too much. An epoch is a pretty big deal. We don’t call the last quarter of the 20th century the Suzuki CCI Epoch, after all.
They also were a bit hyperbolic with this description of the interior:
“Surrounds you with safe comfort?” I’m not sure I really believe any of those words. That interior is barely surrounding anything. It’s almost just two exposed seats on a platform. I’m sure those seats are comfortable enough, but this ain’t no Lincoln. And safe? An open 1970s Kei-class car is only safe if you run it into a wall of marshmallows or something.
The brochure also listed some interesting examples of how to outfit and use these LJs, including the usual pumping and hauling and fire service kinds of things. I was surprised to see this one, showing a whole camera/video tape rig in there. They mention it all running from the generator, which feels like a lot, but maybe? Those big CRTs did kind of slurp power.
Also, look at those spools of cable! And just how big all that stuff is! Your phone’s video recording abilities likely eclipse anything all this hardware could do.
Anyway, thanks for letting me share my daily obsession. I’d love to try and drive one of these early Jimnys; It’d be fun to take one out on some trail with David in his DIY WWII Jeep and see how it compares!
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