Suzuki Built Japan’s Answer To The Chevy El Camino

When you read the name, “Suzuki Mighty Boy,” what are you picturing? Maybe a full-size pickup, or a unibody like the Santa Cruz? Maybe some kind of rugged off-roader like the Toyota Land Cruiser? What about an ATV with big chunky tires? Well, the Mighty Boy is none of those things. It’s actually a coupé utility, like an El Camino, in the Japanese kei car size class, and it weighs in at a meager 1,213 pounds, at its heaviest.

Coupé utility vehicles are already an odd fit, sacrificing the back seat for a truck bed without offering the same workhorse capability of a small pickup. When you shrink it down by half, it’s an even weirder proposition. Still, the Mighty Boy has its fans, and it has its charms. Here’s everything you need to know about Suzuki’s kei-sized ute.

The Only Coupé Utility Kei Of The 550 cc Era

If you know a bit about kei cars, we don’t need to tell you that they exist because Japanese drivers are taxed based on the size of their car. In 1976, maximum engine sizes to qualify for the lower tax rate were upgraded from 360 cc to 550 cc, and that ruling stood until 1990, when the size was upgraded to 660 cc. The Mighty Boy first hit the market in February 1983, with the final unit rolling off the floor of the Kosai Assembly Plant in 1988, making this Japan’s only attempt at a coupé utility in the 550 cc era.

The Mighty Boy was built as an offshoot of the second-generation Suzuki Cervo SS40, itself a four-seat hatchback replacement for the first-gen sports coupé model retired in 1982. The Mighty Boy lacked the optional turbocharger offered in the Cervo, as it was intended to compete with kei trucks more than with the car segment. To this end, the ute featured comfortable reclining seats unlike anything you’d find in Japan’s tiny cab forward trucks.

At a meager two feet in length, the Mighty Boy’s tiny cargo box was essentially useless for any serious work duty, barely competing with the trunk space of a typical kei sedan. But hey, at least you could prop a nightstand or an office chair with a bungee cord and not have to worry about closing the lid on it.

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Sales for the Mighty Boy never quite took off. The ute sold enough units each year to stick around through the decade, and there was a mostly-cosmetic facelift model for 1985 with a new carburetor that boosted the power output to 30 hp, but the Mighty Boy would ultimately turn out to be more of an oddity in its home country than a serious competitor in its segment. To this day, Suzuki hasn’t built another kei-sized ute.

Some Maniac Put A V8 In One Of These Things

We’ve already mentioned the meager curb weight of this thing, but we’ll say it again: 1,213 lbs. Barely more than half a ton. Putting a V8 in this Micro Machine seems more like an experiment in homemade fireworks than it does like a legitimate engine swap, but we know of at least one owner in Australia wild enough to give it a shot.

For this engine-swap, the Mighty Boy was converted to rear-wheel drive with a three-speed T400 drag racing transmission, making it an honest to god muscle car you could just about park in the backseat of a Camaro. The squirrely handling is obviously part of the fun as the driver wrangles the fishtail and disappears around the corner in a cloud of white smoke.

It reminds us of the V8 Cygnet we highlighted recently, another project building a high-power rear-wheel drive V8 out of a tiny city car that can barely handle the modest front-wheel power it already has.

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Australia’s Favorite Beater?

The Mighty Boy only ever made it to two export markets: Cyprus and, you guessed it, Australia, the land of the ute.

Upgrades for the international market included chrome roof rails, bucket seats, and twelve-inch wheels. Missing was the five-speed manual transmission, but the four-speed launched at just A$5,795, or right around A$20,000, adjusting for inflation. This made the Mighty Boy the cheapest car available in Australia at the time of its launch in 1985.

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According to the folks at Team Mighty Boy, an Australian enthusiast community for owners and fans, Suzuki import dealers don’t seem to have kept the records of sales during the ute’s Australian heyday, from 1985 to 1988, with total sales estimates varying wildly from around 2,000 to 5,000, depending on who you ask. Today it’s known that at least a few hundred units have survived everything from rugged daily use in Australia’s vast Outback to cruising the city streets of Sydney and Perth.

We highly recommend perusing the Team Mighty Boy builds forum if you want to see some cool project cars. Hot hatches are a particularly popular choice for Mighty Boy owners, with plenty of turbo-three and four conversions to be found.

As much as we’d love to see this thing go back into production, the Mighty Boy is one of those cars that we’re never going to see again (and certainly not with a 440-horse V8 under the hood). For all its charms, the Suzuki Mighty Boy is simply not practical enough for the daily-driver segment, and it’s too weird to really justify itself as a niche product. Where something like a Jeep Wrangler is a perfect second car for weekends and camping trips, the Mighty Boy is more of a third car, and you won’t find a lot of Japanese drivers with three cars.

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But, if you’re interested, these things go for pretty cheap on the used market. They don’t pop up for sale very often, least of all in the US, but we know of at least one auction this year that closed at just $6,600 in March, for a 1986 model with just two previous owners.

Sources:
Team Mighty Boy
,
Reserve Bank of Australia