Mitsubishi Still Totally Blasé About Killing the Beloved Evo & Eclipse
Mitsubishi once built some of the most iconic performance cars in the land. Today they offer nothing but econoboxes and crossovers. Why?
The Mitsubishi Evolution and Eclipse need no introduction. But since it has been a while since either have been produced, we will give you one anyway. The Eclipse hit US shores in the late ‘80s and enjoyed a 20-plus year run as one of the most exciting performance cars you could buy. The early cars had the same engine as what was being put into the Mitsubishi rally cars of the time. This meant the engine was very tunable and became a massive hit with the import tuner crowd. A second-gen model was even one of the hero cars in the first Fast and Furious film. If anything, the Evolution was even more iconic. This economy car turned rally winning sedan was the dream car of many enthusiasts. Car nerds absolutely loved these models and their future seemed bright. It wasn’t.
Mitsubishi has not produced an Evo or Eclipse in over 5 years. To make matters worse, they have not been replaced by an updated performance model. The Mitsubishi lineup is completely bereft of anything that even resembles a performance car. How can that be? Nolan Sykes of Donut Media explains this to us in a recent video on the Donut Media YouTube Channel. The long and the short of it is that Mitsubishi just doesn’t care about what us enthusiasts think.
The first thing to understand is that Mitsubishi is not a car company. Mitsubishi Motors is a subsidiary of the Mitsubishi Corporation. The parent company is involved in everything from food to air conditioners. Building cars is only a small piece of the pie. “If your business doesn’t necessarily rely on cars to survive, how does that influence what kinds of cars you build?” Askes Sykes. It is a good question, and the answer seems to be build whatever is profitable and skip everything else. Sykes shows us a graph of Mitsubishi sales and even in the heyday, the Eclipse and Evo models are tiny fractions of overall vehicle sales. Enthusiasts may be a passionate group, but they don’t buy in the same volume as the general public.
Y2K was the beginning of the end for Mitsubishi sports cars. In 2000, Daimler Chrysler bought 34% of Mitsubishi Motors for $2 billion. Shortly after, it was discovered that Mitsubishi was not reporting defects customers reported. This led to a recall of 600,000 cars which cost the company about $69 million. This caused great concern at Daimler Chrysler and they began to sell off their stake in Mitsubishi motors. By 2005, they had severed all ties completely. Given all the uncertainty, we were lucky we still got a new Evo.
The Evo X was launched in 2007 and with it was a new aluminum block engine to replace the much-loved 4G63T from the previous generation. Diehards were concerned over this switch. “An aluminum block? Are you kidding me dude? There’s no way it will be as strong as the cast iron block.” Mocks Sykes. The new engine performed as well, if not better than the old unit. Still auto enthusiasts don’t like to see big changes like that in their favorite cars.
The downward spiral continued in 2010 when Mitsubishi closed their performance division Ralli Art in 2010. Uh oh. “I told you, they don’t care what you think.” Says Sykes. Sales were in a freefall. From 2002 to 2012 Mitsubishi sales had dropped by a staggering 600%. Something had to be done quickly if the company was to survive. In 2011 a new plan was rolled out. This plan was the death knell for Mitsubishi performance cars. The plan was to shift to global small cars, hybrids and electrics. You know, boring crap. However, boring crap sells. It makes us mad, but those vehicles do sell to the general public. One of the biggest punches to the gut though was that they took the iconic Eclipse name and slapped it onto the Eclipse Cross SUV. Ouch.
So, Mitsubishi no longer makes anything that any self-respecting car person would ever want to own. That is quite sad. But their sales are up. Maybe if we are lucky, after a couple more years of solid sales they will give us some performance cars. We can only hope they start to care about us again.
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