Suzuki celebrates its centenary in October.

Back in 1909, Michio Suzuki founded the Suzuki Loom Company in Hamamatsu, southern Japan — and it was while manufacturing looms for production of plain white fabric he learned weavers wanted looms that could produce cloth with vertical and horizontal stripes.

So, he developed

a unique loom capable of weaving patterned cloth from dyed yarn.

Suzuki’s new innovation represented the start of an uncompromising focus on creating products that meet people’s needs and realize new lifestyle possibilities.

Suzuki expanded into production of motorcycles in 1952 with the Power Free, using a 36-cc, two-stroke engine.

The Power Free was simple in design, offered easy maintenance and was unique at that time as it could be ridden fully motorized, partially motorized or by using the pedals without any engine assistance.

Just a year later, Suzuki was building 6,000 motorcycles per month.

Suzuki car production began in 1955 with the Suzulight, a compact car with a 360-cc, two-stroke engine.

The Suzulight was one of the first cars to feature front-wheel drive, four-wheel independent suspension and rack and pinion steering.

Suzuki’s off-road vehicle heritage began in 1970 with the launch of the LJ series lightweight 4x4.

The first marine outboard motor was introduced in 1965, then pre-fabricated houses in 1974, general-purpose engines in 1980 and its first all-terrain vehicle (ATV) in 1982.

Aggregate car production topped 10 million units in 1989 and global annual production exceeded one million units by 1990.

Since then, Suzuki has continued to enjoy growth in demand; its annual car production breaking the two million units barrier in 2005 and total car production reaching

40 million units in 2008.

Looking to the future, Suzuki plans to concentrate strongly on lowering emissions even further

and presented stop/start concepts as well as a new variable valve-timing system at the Geneva Motor show.

This technology will reduce emissions of Alto to 95g/km and Splash to 109g/km.

In the longer term, further development includes the eventual introduction of hydrogen fuel-cell technology for its medium-size vehicles and Suzuki recently tested an SX4 fuel cell vehicle on public roads in Japan.