Suzuki Mighty Boy With 440-HP V8 Is Not Your Typical Kei Car

Chances are you haven't heard about a car called the Suzuki Mighty Boy. The "utility" vehicle, which has a measly 600mm (around 2 feet) bed, was too small to haul anything, but it existed as a pickup version of the Suzuki Cervo. Both the Cervo and the Mighty Boy were introduced in the '80s and fit right into the Kei car category of Japan.

Now, why have you never heard of this car? Well, that's because it was only sold in Japan and two export markets, Australia and Cyprus. According to reports, only fewer than 3,000 units were imported outside the Land of the Rising Sun, but somewhere between 300 to 400 units remain today.

One of which, though, is the one you see in the video featured above. Located in Australia and visited the 2021 Powercruise Perth, this isn't any other Mighty Boy unit that still exists today.

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Under the hood of this Kei car is a 6.0-liter V8 fuel-injected engine. Running on E85 fuel, this small car makes 440 horsepower (324 kilowatts) at the rear wheels, sent via a T400 gearbox. Now, the Mighty Boy only weighs around 1,212 pounds (550 kilograms), which means it's near as light as the heaviest production touring bikes around.

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Of note, the original Suzuki Mighty Boy was powered by a 543cc SOHC three-cylinder transversely mounted engine, with the most powerful version only making 31 hp (23 kW) and 32 pound-feet (Newton-meters) of torque. That said, the example that you see here has 11 times the displacement as it had before. Crazy.

For a car of this size and weight, we don't need to tell you how sick this build is – and how hard the cutesy menace was to control, as seen in the four-minute feature embedded above.

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