About Mitsubishi
Mitsubishi's car business traces back to the Model A of 1917, one of Japan's first series-produced automobiles, and the modern Mitsubishi Motors was spun out of the sprawling Mitsubishi industrial group in 1970. Its reputation was forged in the dirt. The Pajero won the Dakar Rally a record twelve times, and the Lancer Evolution, a turbocharged, all-wheel-drive sedan built to homologate world rally cars, became one of the most revered performance cars of the 1990s and 2000s.
Americans of a certain age remember a different Mitsubishi, the one that sold the Eclipse, the 3000GT VR-4 and the Galant, and built cars in Normal, Illinois, until 2015. The brand's American presence shrank sharply in the 2000s, and in 2016 a scandal over falsified fuel-economy data pushed it into the arms of Nissan, which bought a controlling stake and folded Mitsubishi into its alliance with Renault. Since then the company has leaned on shared platforms and its stronghold markets in Southeast Asia, Australia and Japan.
Today Mitsubishi is a crossover and pickup specialist. The Outlander, especially in plug-in hybrid form, is its global flagship; the Triton pickup and the Xforce and Xpander families sell strongly in Asia; and the Pajero has been revived after several years away, with strong early orders in Japan. A new agreement to supply Honda with a Triton-based pickup marks a fresh alliance, and the Lancer Evolution's spirit still haunts every product announcement. Coverage here includes product reveals and SEMA concepts like the Outlander Diamond Trail Edition, plant investments, sales reports, recalls, alliance news with Nissan and Honda, and the rugged off-road ambitions the company keeps teasing, including talk of a two-door Pajero to rival the Ford Bronco. For a small automaker, Mitsubishi generates a surprising amount of enthusiast hope.