The Mitsubishi Galant – on its Way Out?
Mitsubishi has been trying to elaborate a way to kick start consumer interest in its cars in US. And it’s also been attempting to make cars that are actually competent for our environmental laws. The best way that Mitsubishi has devised of doing this, is to go after plug-in electrics in a big way. There are six new electric models coming over the next four years. And as a way to liven up its lineup, Mitsubishi has decided to shed a little deadweight – and that includes the well-loved classic, the Mitsubishi Galant midsize sedan (there is no conspiracy against the Galant – Mitsubishi will be dropping the Eclipse and the Endeavor also).
In about three years, the Mitsubishi Galant will no more be on our roads. Why are they doing this? To start with, this has always been a niche model. It hasn’t been selling well enough to justify a whole model line. And since it’s quite a large car, building it in the Mitsubishi factory in Normal, Illinois, and then exporting it overseas is a moderately difficult thing. They first transport it by surface to a port on the West Coast or the East Coast and then load it on ships to be transported to the Far East and Europe. Mitsubishi feels that it has totally the wrong model lineup for today’s market. What it wants to do is to concentrate on smaller and lighter electric cars.
It is not just that it’s difficult to transport the Mitsubishi Galant and other large cars to export markets.
Consumers today are beginning to favor smaller and more effective cars. To accomplish efficiency in a small car, they’d have to install very expensive exhaust treatment systems on them – a move that would take away whatever price advantage that buying a small car could have for a consumer. It looks clear to Mitsubishi that the single thing left for them to do is to abandon normal gas-powered cars and switch completely to hybrids and electric cars all in all.
Mitsubishi has been in the US ever since the year 1982 (even if Chrysler used to sell Mitsubishi cars rebadged as Dodges and Plymouths before then). It was around the year 2002 that Mitsubishi was at its most popular, selling almost half a million cars. And then they began to collapse. They thought that they would position themselves as the sporty choice for the youth market. While that did work bringing in young buyers in droves, these were not people who were actually able to afford their cars. They defaulted in droves too. Mitsubishi is down now to approximately 30,000 cars a year – and the company’s plant in Illinois is barely functioning. For now, they are only going to be building the Evolution and the Outlander in the predictable future.
