THE GREATEST HITS

While Mitsubishi has always been a small brand in the UK, it has proven itself capable of punching above its weight with some standout vehicles.

LANCER EVOLUTION

The World Rally Championship’s 1990s Group A era helped transform perceptions of Mitsubishi and Subaru. The rules allowed the companies to shoehorn four-wheel-drive technology into their plodding Lancer and Impreza saloons, and the homologation versions became cult classics. The Lancer Evo’s grey-import popularity eventually prompted Mitsubishi to offer it outside of Japan, but just as it struggled with the new World Rally Car rules in the 2000s, so the Evo’s popularity waned. It was axed after 10 generations in 2016.

SHOGUN

The Lancer Evo may have made Mitsubishi cool, but the brand’s undoubted hero car remains the Shogun. The heavy-duty off-roader, launched in 1982, utilised Mitsubishi’s four-wheel-drive technology to great effect, making it a truly rugged rival to the Land Rover Defender and Toyota Land Cruiser. But the high development costs and limited market for 4x4s has stymied efforts to develop a fifth-generation model for when the current version goes out of production – after a mammoth 15-year run – next year.

OUTLANDER PHEV

Some dismiss the Outlander PHEV’S success as purely down to tax breaks, sniffily suggesting you’ll find its charging cables unused in its boot. While that was clearly part of its appeal (it was the only plug-in hybrid to qualify for the £5000 government grant and had a BIK tax rate of just 5%), it’s also a strong, sturdy and hugely practical SUV. And Mitsubishi deserves credit for capitalising on such incentives: larger firms are only now catching up. But those grants are now gone and new PHEVS are flooding the market, so Outlander sales have fallen sharply.