It’s coming up on four years now since Mitsubishi stopped selling cars in the UK. We weren’t too sad about that, other than seeing its utterly beautiful collection of heritage press cars going to auction.
Truthfully, with a line-up that consisted of the hateful Mirage and ASX, completely average Eclipse Cross, the ok-but-ageing Outlander PHEV and the same adjectives for the L200 pick-up, it wasn’t exactly making a big dent in the UK market.
However, it could potentially return – although believed it would need ‘the right product line-up’ for it to happen.
Mitsubishi ASX
That’s according to Frank Krol, boss of Mitsubishi Motors Europe, who told Autocar: “If you look at the potential and size of the market, it's our preferred route to go back, basically. But we need to have the right product line-up for that.”
How its line-up would look in the UK is very much up for speculation. In Europe, it will soon sell just one of its own-developed products, the Outlander PHEV (the generation after the final one sold in the UK. It eventually stopped building that one), with the current Eclipse Cross being phased out.
The rest are renosed Renaults. That includes the Colt (a Clio with a new face), the ASX (a Captur with a new face) and soon the Grandis (a Symbioz… you get it). A new Eclipse Cross is expected later in the year, so it remains to be seen which Renault that is.
Mitsubishi Outlander
That would, in theory, make selling those cars in the UK much easier, given each of those Renaults is currently sold here – so there should be no regulatory headaches to overcome.
Rather, that’ll be in rebuilding a dealer network and getting itself back into the consciousness of customers. Krol seems to recognise that, adding: “It is not preferred to have an extremely long period without any sales presence. That's something we would need to consider.”
Now, a new Lancer Evolution might do it, just saying…
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