NO FRILLS, NO COMPLAINTS
Mitsubishi’s efficient, affordable Mirage hatchback gets the job done
These days, it’s hard to find a genuinely bad car. Even at the budget level, cutthroat competition has driven consumer expectations to the point where merely adequate is unacceptable. It’s a great time to be a buyer.
For critics, however, the pickings are slim. For those who derive intense satisfaction from exposing the shortcomings of others, there’s depressingly little to find fault with. And let’s face it, snickering over an evisceration is a heck of a lot more entertaining than yet another formulaic recount of a well-crafted, but ultimately forgettable product.
After the New York Times published a particularly savage review of the Mitsubishi Mirage, the automotive press gleefully piled on, and an all-out feeding frenzy ensued. Finally, here was something it could really get its teeth into and run with.
But was this lampooning justified? We decided to find out. The Mirage’s sales numbers have been modest; approximately 32,000 in the U.S. and 6,269 in Canada since it was introduced in 2013. A search of online consumer reviews suggests that, overall, buyers are happy with their little bargain-basement hatchback.
There’s no question the Mirage is decidedly no-frills. The Thailand-built subcompact wasn’t intended for the North American market, but was rerouted here to satisfy increasingly stringent fuel-consumption requirements and buyers have shown there’s room in our car-loving culture for basic transportation that’s efficient and affordable.
And thanks to Nissan effectively dropping a bomb on the segment in the form of its $9,998 Micra, Mitsubishi is offering a $2,500 incentive on the $12,498 entry-level Mirage to match the Micra’s price.
The Mirage isn’t much to look at. There’s nothing stylish or daring in its execution. It’s rather bland and inoffensive, an amorphous, jelly bean, shaped by efficiency rather than style.
The tiny, 14-inch wheel covers look as if they came off the shelf at Walmart. Although the roof line ends with a saucy flick, the tiny spoiler is there solely for aerodynamic purposes. But this is the entry-level ES. Moving up the trim levels to the SE gets you alloy wheels, fog lights, body-coloured door handles and front, side and rear air dams.
Overall, the Mirage has a drag coefficient of 0.28 and weighs in at a paltry 895 kilograms, compared to the Micra at 980 kg, or the Chevy Spark’s 1,029 kg. The paint palette, at least, is lighthearted and fun, with choices that include Kiwi Green, Plasma Purple or the Sapphire Blue of my tester.
The interior is rather dreary, but as the owner of a 25-yearold hatchback, I find it’s perfectly acceptable. At least it’s well laid out and the dash and centre console are well executed despite the abundance of cheap hard plastics. And unlike the Micra’s “roll your own” window operation, the Mirage has power control for both windows and mirrors. I’m relatively short, so the lack of a telescoping steering wheel wasn’t a really big issue, but taller drivers might have trouble finding a comfortable steering position.
Up front, the cloth seats are firm but comfortable, but the rear bench seat is just a thin flat slab of foam. There’s no contouring, no bolstering, and no cradling of backsides here. The seat backs are split 60-40, and they flop down to extend the cargo area to an impressive 1,330 litres, from 235 L with the seats up, which is more than the Spark’s 883 L or the Micra’s 820 L.
There’s no reassuring “thud” when the door closes behind you; like everything else about the Mirage, it feels light and insubstantial. But the lack of weightadding sound insulation is another fuel-saving measure; the Mirage’s official ratings are 5.3 L/100 km city and 6.4 highway with the CVT, and 5.5/7.0 with the manual.
Those are the sort of numbers we generally see only with hybrid vehicles.