Hi, I'm a newbie with a couple of questions...

[gadzooks]

Hi, I've owned Suzuki products for about 22 years now (a '88 Samurai for 12 years and a '94 Sidekick for almost 10 years) and now I'm looking at getting another Suzuki.
I'm looking at the 2006 Aerio AWD automatic and i was wondering if I could get some opinions about it. (It has 76K on it)
First I took it for a test drive and the transmission feels slow to respond. When I hit the gas, it feels like the transmission is slipping. It feels like there's a 2-3 second gap from when i press the gas petal, to when he car starts to go. Is this normal, or do you think something's slipping inside. It's been about 30 years since I've had a auto transmission and things may have changed a bit.
Also the car comes with tires sized 195- 55- 15 inch. Has anyone put bigger tires on theirs? and how big? I'm not going to take it 4X4ing, I just want a wider tire to make it a little more stable on the highway.
And maybe a little taller tire just to give it another inch or so of ground clearance.

Thanks in advance.

[Devilsword]

being a man who has owned both a auto and a stick aerio i can say that the auto has a rather gap before it kicks in. plus you have the extra drive-train its going through with the awd. Another thing is that they put allot of slack in the throttle cable to improve mpg. pulling the slack in should help with that. i will tell you though that if i had the choice again between an awd auto of a manual fwd i would take the manual all over again.

[Raerio]

While I can not answer to the throttle thing. I can talk about the tires
I have a '02.
The 195's are about as wide as you need and about as big as you can get with out throwing the gearing off. I found it handles very good a speeds with these tires
Because of the shape you are affected by the wind ( seems like you move around a lot ) but if you trust the car it handles very well .

[azsuzuki]

When replacing the 195/55/15 original tires, I found that the cost for a new set was quite high. By switching to 205/50/15, there were many more reasonably priced options. There have been no noticeable changes to the car's ride or handling.

The only definable difference is that the speedometer now reads too fast (c. 1mph). This is a good thing in helping to avoid speeding tickets. If you change the specs too much, you will throw off your speedometer significantly. Use this calculator to show the results of using different tire sizes:

Tire size calculator