Mitsubishi Outlander review
by David Finlay (20 February 2007)
The mid-sized SUV sector (or SUV2 as it's known in the business) is becoming very competitive these days. Sales have been surging upwards in recent years as more customers see the appeal of the Land Rover Freelander and its ever-increasing band of Far Eastern rivals. The original Mitsubishi Outlander - launched here in 2003, when Mitsubishi was in terrible trouble - was not a strong contender, and its replacement simply has to do better.
Four years on, the company is in a less perilous condition, and the second-generation Outlander appears more promising. European tastes being what they are, it defied belief that the earlier car was not available with a turbo diesel engine. The new one comes to market with nothing but - the only engine available from launch is Volkswagen's 138bhp two-litre TDI unit.
This is by no means the only example of Mitsubishi co-operating with other manufacturers. The basis of the Outlander is a platform created in conjunction with DaimlerChrysler (the very company, ironically, which invested heavily in Mitsubishi before the first Outlander appeared and severed the connection shortly afterwards).
The same platform will be used for the forthcoming Citroen C-Crosser and Peugeot 4007, and in return Mitsubishi gets to use PSA Peugeot Citroen's 2.2-litre HDi turbo diesel, which will be along later. The Outlander will have been on sale for several months before it becomes available with an engine that Mitsubishi has created itself - a new 168bhp 2.4-litre petrol unit which, unlike the diesels, will use a CVT transmission instead of a manual (diesel automatics may dominate the large SUV market, but they hardly appear on the SUV2 radar).
Among the two-litre diesels which make up all the first batch of Outlanders to go on sale, there are three versions - Equippe (£19,449, Group 10 insurance, 10% of projected sales), Warrior (£21,999, Group 11, 60%) and Elegance (£24,749, Group 12, 30%). We'll come to the equipment levels shortly, but for now you should know that the smaller wheels and tyres of the Equippe make it more economical than the others (42.8mpg rather than 40.9mpg combined). It's also the only one to have five seats - the others are fitted as standard with seven.
Mitsubishi makes a lot of the fact that the Outlander takes up less road space than the BMW 5-Series, Ford Mondeo and Volkswagen Passat. It's difficult to imagine fitting seven people into any of those cars, so you may not be surprised to learn that it isn't much easier to do this in the Outlander.
In fact the Outlander isn't a serious seven-seater at all. The back row consists of a foldaway bench which can accommodate two small bottoms in the upright position (that's the bench being upright, not the bottoms). Legroom is so restricted that the idea of fitting two adults back there is not worth considering.
The seats in the middle row can be slid forward and back, and they also recline, but there seems to be no way of setting them so that the occupants can enjoy decent headroom. Anyone over six feet tall has to accept that their head is going to touch the roof; I'm six foot three, and no journey would be short enough to persuade me that I should take it in the middle row of an Outlander.
One thing I do like about those seats, though, is that they can be folded away so easily. You don't even have to touch them. Just press a button in the luggage compartment for three seconds, and they do the job themselves. Once they have done so, and assuming that the third row is already tucked under the boot floor, the Outlander has a splendid 1691 litres of luggage capacity.
Even with the middle seats sitting upright and moved back as far as they will go, you still get 541 litres up to the window line (it helps that the boot floor is significantly lower in this car than it was in the outgoing model).
There are no complaints about space in the front seats, though it seems incredible that Mitsubishi has compromised driver comfort by not making the steering wheel adjustable for reach. I mean, in this day and age - well, honestly.
Visibility seems good on the open road, but all the pillars are thick enough to create significant blind spots, and you have to be particularly careful when reversing; the upswept design of the rear side windows may be fashionable, but it's not helpful.
The Volkswagen turbo diesel engine is easily up to the job, and in fact it pulls the Outlander along so well that I can't help wondering what advantage will be gained when the more powerful PSA unit comes along. A slight rethink of the suspension set-up might be a good idea, because the Outlander feels only just capable of dealing with 138bhp.
It also has enough front-end bounce to feel like an old-school SUV, rather than one which has been compromised in favour of tarmac driving. Actually, I'm told that it does quite well as an off-roader, though Mitsubishi is so unconcerned about this that it doesn't offer a low-range transfer box. Similarly, the Outlander normally operates in front-wheel drive only, though you can twiddle a knob on the centre console to send some of the torque to the rear axle.
Standard equipment for the entry-level Outlander Equippe includes air-conditioning, keyless entry, a six-speaker CD/MP3 audio system, Active Stability and Traction Control, electric windows and mirrors and a rear spoiler. The Warrior - that's the one that will outsell all the others in the UK - gets the third row of seats and the 18" alloys mentioned earlier, plus side and curtain airbags, a bodykit, cruise control, a Bluetooth hands-free phone kit, privacy glass, silver roof rails, front foglights and leather covering for the steering wheel and gearlever.
On top of all that, the Elegance comes with electrically-adjustable heated leather seats, a powered sunroof, a nine-speaker 650W Rockford Fosgate premium sound system and a Multi-Communication system consisting of satellite navigation (with a 30GB hard disk), a music server and a DVD player.
It's too early for prices to have been confirmed for the forthcoming models, but a fair guess would be that the 2.4-litre petrol cars will be a little cheaper, and the 2.2-litre turbo diesels more expensive, than the ones available at launch. All other things being equal, I suspect that the Volkswagen-engined cars will still be the ones to go for.
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