Mitsubishi

Mitsubishi was founded in 1870 as a shipping company, but over time it grew into one of Japan’s largest industrial giants, building airplanes, ships, and from 1917, cars. Mitsubishi’s Model A, based on a Fiat design, was Japan’s very first series production car. Few people in Japan could afford luxury cars, however, and after 1922 Mitsubishi focused on trucks.

Truck production resumed after World War II, when the original firm was broken up into a series of new companies, the largest of which was Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. The company returned to building cars with the Mitsubishi 500 in 1960. The tiny car was a hit at home, leading to an expanded range of models starting with 1962’s Mitsubishi Colt 600.

By 1970 the car division was successful enough to be spun off into its own corporate entity, Mitsubishi Motors. A year later, Chrysler purchased 15% of the company and began a long, but sometimes contentious, partnership with Mitsubishi. Americans first got to know Mitsubishi’s products as the Dodge Colt and Plymouth Arrow in the 1970s. Expanding worldwide, by 1978 40% of Mitsubishi’s cars were exported out of Japan.

Keen to break out on its own in America, the company set up Mitsubishi Motors of America in and began selling cars under its own name in 22 states in 1981. Its first products were the Cordia and Tredia compacts and the Starion sports coupe, aimed at Toyota’s Celica and Mazda’s RX-7. The Montero SUV and Mighty Max pickup soon followed. Sales grew rapidly and by 1990 Mitsubishi was selling nearly 200,000 cars a year in the USA, not including the rebadged Mitsubishis sold at Chrysler dealers. Chrysler divested from Mitsubishi in 1993, but the two companies shared platforms until the late 2000s.

From the 1970s to the 1990s, Mitsubishi developed a reputation for technological innovation, showcasing advanced multi-valve engines, all-wheel drive systems, and even the world’s first forward distance warning alert system, on production vehicles like the 3000GT sports car. It also enjoyed much racing success with the Lancer EVO and off-road versions of the Montero.

Japan’s hard economic times in the 1990s led to more conservative and less interesting products, but Americans still liked Mitsubishi’s Eclipse sport coupe and the evergreen Montero, which got a smaller companion 1997, the Montero Sport. Mitsubishi’s U.S. sales topped 300,000 a year in the early 2000s, fueled by easy credit supplied by the company’s captive finance arm. That resulted in many loan defaults and depressed resale values, with sales tumbling on the eve of the great recession.

In the USA Mitsubishi pivoted away from SUVs in the late 2000s, ending sales of the once-popular Montero and Endeavor (formerly the Montero Sport) while focusing on the long-delayed, slow-selling iMiEV electric car, only for Americans to become more interested than ever in SUVs. Since the mid-2010s the compact Outlander and subcompact Outlander Sport crossovers have been the core of Mitsubishi’s U.S. line. In 2017, it brought back an old name on another small crossover, the Eclipse Cross, and introduced a popular plug-in hybrid version of the Outlander.

That same year, Nissan took a 34% stake in Mitsubishi Motors, bringing the company into the Nissan-Renault Alliance. The next generation of Mitsubishi products will be developed in concert with Nissan, starting with the all-new 2022 Outlander, expected to begin arriving at dealerships in the summer of 2021.