Farewell, Mitsubishi
Juicy stories about its UK arm
It’s 1986 and I’m in a light aeroplane that’s attempting a night landing in strong winds at Staverton airport in Gloucestershire. My fellow passengers are four colleagues: Peter Beaumont, managing director of Colt Car Company, which began importing Mitsubishi cars to the UK in 1974, and three of his directors.
We’ve flown back from Edinburgh, where we had earlier in the day hosted a regional meeting with Colt’s Scottish dealer group. As we line up to the runway, the little plane, one of a handful of company aircraft including an executive jet and a helicopter, feels like a cork in the ocean. With the exception of Beaumont, who remains ice cool, the directors are alternately groaning and cursing.
Eventually, the plane touches down and taxis to a stop. Everyone piles out. Quickly the tension evaporates, cigars are lit and relieved laughter breaks out. Not for the first time, I feel a bond with my Colt bosses that lasts even as I fire up my humble Lancer saloon while they roar off in their considerably flashier Galant and Starion Turbos.
Recollections like this are why I’m mourning Mitsubishi’s recent announcement that it will gradually pull out of the UK. I was at Colt for only four years in the mid-1980s – two of them supplying dealers with their cars and two selling cars to the public from the company’s Cirencester showroom – but while there had some of the best and most challenging times of my working life.
I had moved with my parents to the quiet Gloucestershire town of Cirencester in 1971 and so was there when Colt arrived in 1974. Japanese reliability underpinned by a long warranty, high levels of equipment and innovative technology characterised its models, which began appearing in the town in large numbers, driven by company employees who looked so much more exciting and sophisticated than us grass-chewing yokels.
The fledgling company’s marketing was also eye-catching. I recall a church fête at which Colt presented what it called a ‘car versus horse’ display that involved driver and rider performing a synchronised routine with the aid of head-mics. It was a bit corny, but the company turned up the heat a short while later when it signed top aerobatic pilot Vic Norman. I saw him many times, most memorably during a sales meeting at Siddington House, Colt’s country retreat outside Cirencester, when he performed an astonishing display in his Zlín sports plane, during which he swooped so low that I swear he put a stripe down the lawn.
Other promotional partnerships included the Bristol Powerboat Championship, also known as the ‘widowmaker’, owing to the high number of fatalities, and the Badminton Horse Trials (standout moment: bacon butties and champagne in Colt’s huge Winnebago motorhome).
Despite government-imposed import quotas on Japanese cars, Colt always punched above its weight. However, sometimes the pressure could prove too much. One day, my regional manager (together we looked after the south-east and west of England) pulled over in a lay-by, opened his car’s boot and threw all of his company papers into a ditch while declaring that he was quitting.
On another occasion, I was harangued at a regional dealer meeting in a Heathrow hotel by an intimidating London dealer who accused me of
favouring a rival with extra Colt automatics. This model was unique in its sector and very popular in the capital. In fact, it was my manager (the one who chucked his career under a hedge) who had fouled up, but I was ordered not to speak.
Not long after, the smooth-voiced, Argentinian boss of a new Colt dealership telephoned, asking me to scrape together some extra Colt Turbos for him (I can still hear his explosive, spittle-filled pronunciation of the ‘b’ in ‘Turbo’). I did my best, but it was a dangerous game to play.
Just how dangerous became apparent when my boss returned from lunch one day and accused me, falsely, of dipping into their allocation of Shoguns for one of my dealers. In front of the sales team, we grappled with each other over the stock books in which new vehicles were logged and allocated. Still, that was nothing compared with the time a senior manager’s wife burst into the boardroom with a shotgun, accusing him of having an affair.
More chillingly, from time to time, a hush would descend as directors arrived in the sales office to coordinate the termination of a dealer. We would listen as the regional manager was instructed to break the news to the dealer principal, count his stock and direct transporter trucks to collect it.
Fortunately, there were happier times, too, such as the occasion we flew to Guernsey in the company jet for lunch and the parties at Siddington House, where I would play the piano. At one of them, the wife of the Colt chairman, who that evening had been given a new Rolls-royce
When Mitsubishi began exporting cars to Britain in 1974, it used the name Colt to avoid negative connotations with its operations in World War II. It stopped the rebadging in 1980.
as a birthday present, quietly professed to preferring my W-reg Mini HL parked outside. After two years, I moved from headquarters to selling at the Cirencester showroom. Here I experienced first-hand just how popular the Shogun 4x4, Spacewagon MPV and L300 panel van were. Even so, I was determined to prove that other models – such as the Sapporo sports saloon, with its trick suspension, and the hairy-chested Starion coupé – could sell too, although with mixed success; I was good with customers but terrible at closing deals. However, I was very pleased one day to take an order for the new Canter truck, the only vehicle in its class with a tilting cab. Pitching for the sale meant demonstrating this function in the industrial estates and business parks of Swindon while trying not to lose my fingers. And then, one day, Colt and I decided to part company – something to do with my selling a Starion to a chap and having to seize it back from his driveway in the dead of night. I joined a Fiat dealer. It wasn’t the same. I recall gazing over the roof of a Panda and out the showroom window as a Colt exec zipped past in his Galant. What fun he was having, I thought. Unless he had just thrown his career into a ditch.