If you’ve followed cars as long as I have, you’d have been following cars since Mitsubishi was last a household name in the industry! Which is to say, in 1999, with the generation three Eclipse. But the company has hung on, sort of, particularly in its home market of Japan and developing regions of the world where it has sold super-compact and highly cost-conscious transportation.
After news Mitsubishi was investing in the Renault-led Ampere EV venture last month, it seems the first product of that cooperation will be a compact SUV meant to slot in where the ASX (based on the Renault Captur) currently does. This C-SUV will share the same underpinnings as the Megane E-Tech, which is currently one of two EVs on sale from the French automaker if you count the aging (but enduringly popular) Zoe. It’s unclear if the Mitsubishi C-SUV will be a badge-engineered Renault, or if it will be a Mitsubishi-led design that merely utilizes Renault’s electrified AmpR Medium platform and manufacturing. We do know the vehicle, whatever it is, will be built in France by Renault and should arrive in 2025, thanks to reporting from drive.
Mitsubishi is in a tough spot, and getting an entry-level EV on the market as soon as possible is probably the only thing that can save its passenger car business globally. A C-SUV makes a lot of sense as the place to start — these lifted hatchbacks aren’t generally popular in the US, but they sell like hotcakes in greater Europe, Asia, Australasia, and Latin America.
Mitsubishi was, weirdly, one of the first carmakers to seriously offer an electric car at relatively global scale. The ill-fated (but fairly long-lived [but terribly named]) i-MiEV and its suped-up golf cart styling burst sensibly rolled onto the scene in the late 2000s, beating the Nissan Leaf to market (and to… absolutely nothing else).
Today, Mitsubishi’s one electric success story comes in the form of a kei car — a super small people-mover called the eK X EV (someone please stop letting Mitsubishi name things) that is crazy popular in Japan and also sold by Nissan as the much nicer-looking and more pleasant-sounding Sakura. Unfortunately, kei cars don’t meet crash standards in most Western nations because they are purpose-built for the Japanese market. Specifically, kei cars must meet dimensional restrictions in order to qualify for special tax status and exemption from certain parking restrictions in the very space-conscious country. In other words: Mitsubishi’s one EV is a one-trick pony.
City Dwellers’s take
As a nominal member of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance, the Japanese carmaker is going to have to lean on its partners for the foreseeable future for global manufacturing and R&D resources. Mitsubishi just doesn’t have what it takes to stand alone these days. Badge engineering is going to have a brand-new heyday in the era of electrification — mark my words. Mitsubishi as a brand may not have much cachet in the rich world these days, but as electrification proliferates beyond the world’s largest economies, its strong association with great value and Japanese reliability could become a valuable asset.
In Europe or North America, selling a Mitsubishi is more of a head-scratcher, especially if this is just going to be a Renault by any other name. But it’s possible whatever Renault ends up building for them could undercut the French make’s offerings with more basic features and capability, I suppose. We’ll just have to wait and see.
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