Small, nimble Mirage makes some noise
Mitsubishi’s city car boasts good mileage, but you pay for it.
Buyers seem to like the Mitsubishi Mirage subcompact sedan for its good mileage ratings and low advertised price.
In fact, its combined city/ highway mpg rating of 40 with continuously variable-ratio automatic transmission (CVT) would meet the tough federal mileage rules for 2025.
But, oh what a price you pay for that. Unless you can live with the bare-bones base model ($13,790), it’s not a great value.
The test car was close to $17,000, but was by no means a feature-packed, surprisingly premium wow-mobile the way some modestly priced Hyundai and Kia models are.
Little about the car says “cool” or “wow” or “smart owner.”
Context is key here. Mirage is one of an emerging group of sub-subcompacts being called city cars. Chevrolet Spark and Chrysler’s Fiat 500 are other examples.
They eschew some of the quietness and refinement that drivers would want if they spent a lot of time on the highway or had a long commute. Instead, they offer park-almost-anywhere dimensions, relatively low prices and generally good mileage.
And the Mirage has some high points: The interior is nice enough and the materials covering the dashboard, door panels and seats need not apologize. The leather-wrapped steering wheel is exceptional.
Headroom is generous. The turn signal lever, of all things, has a nice, rich feel. And anything that tempts people to use the signals more often, we applaud.
Exterior styling is nicely executed, which is hard to do on a small car. The optional back-up camera has a crisp picture.
But what seems to be good leg room specifications don’t translate to usable space in real life. Another reminder that you can’t make buying decisions solely from a spec sheet.
And the three-cylinder engine that delivers the good mpg is ohso unpleasant: buzzy, coarse, un- derpowered. Mated to a rev-happy CVT, it makes ordinary acceleration a sensory torture.
Other automakers with an interest in putting three-cylinder engines into the U.S. should hope people don’t form their impressions from a Mirage.
Mitsubishi pitches the car as fun to drive and we suppose that could be true, if your idea of fun is the adventure of not knowing just where the over-boosted, yet numb, steering is pointing the wheels. Or how hard you have to push the spongy brake pedal to get into full “whoa” mode. Or which direction the car will try to veer as it bounds and bobs over undulating bumps.
And it could qualify as fun to drive because you’ll want your favorite tunes cranked up loud to drown out the road roar and mask the dramatic “thunk” from the suspension over sharp bumps.
But that’s a suburban view. The city-car milieu at which Mirage is aimed could make the car seem almost delightful to people whose motoring lives are city-constricted.
The car’s about the same overall size as a Mini Cooper hardtop, a bit bigger than a Fiat 500, and boasts a strikingly tight turning circle of about 30 feet. Midsize sedans take about 36 to 38 feet.
Mirage mileage won’t match a hybrid but is among the best without a hybrid price premium.
Our short-hop, heavy-foot suburban shuffle hit nearly 30 mpg. A highway run with fast-moving traffic topped out at 42 mpg before a crosswind joined the party and dropped it to about 39 mpg.
We’d bet that a person driving carefully, with mileage as the goal, could hit the ratings of 37 mpg in the city, 44 on the highway and 40 mpg in combined city/highway rating.
Those are for the CVT, which the test car had. Manual models give up two or three mpg.
Mirage isn’t dirt cheap. But for some, it could be today’s equivalent of the 1980s Yugo.
That $5,000 Yugoslavian car was cheap enough to buy on your credit card and not wince much if it got parking scrapes. It was, for some buyers, disposable transportation. For others, it was the only new car they could afford.
Mirage is a hugely better vehicle than Yugo was, but most vehicles are a lot better now. And today, some people have credit card limits high enough to charge a Mirage.
Test Drive sees the Mirage as a lot more substantial and valuable than the auto equivalent of a disposable pen. But we also understand how some wellheeled types view it way.
It’s easy to see the lure of a nearly affordable new car for budget buyers, especially if they and don’t need much room.
City-dwelling colleagues and friends keep insisting that trim dimensions are an asset, worth seeking out and paying for. But we still are convinced that, given their druthers, most Americans would buy bigger instead of smaller, in whatever context.
When it was time for a Cooper remake, what did Mini do? Made it bigger. So did Toyota when it was time to update the Scion xB.
The once-diminutive Honda Civic has grown to the former size of an Accord. And so on.
Test Drive would rather have a car more refined and a little bigger — Honda Fit, Mazda2, Hyundai Accent, Kia Rio — knowing we’d visit the gas pump a little more often and wind up driving around bit more, looking for a parking spot a few inches longer.