Take Your Pick
by David Finlay (19 Apr 2006)

Although UK enthusiasm for them is unlikely ever to reach the extraordinary levels seen in the US, pickups are nevertheless appearing on our roads to an extent that would have seemed outlandish ten years ago. To a large extent, that's because manufacturers have decided that a pickup need not necessarily be a mud-encrusted workhorse (though that's a perfectly reasonable thing for it to be) but might also be - if you'll excuse the term - a "lifestyle" vehicle.

Mitsubishi got on to this act some time ago, with impressive success. The sales explosion of pickups in the UK is due in no small part to the success of the original L200. which at one point accounted for very nearly half the market. In other words, if you heard that three strangers had just bought themselves a new pickup, you could pretty much bet the farm that two of them had opted for an L200. The importance of not dropping the catch in designing that model's namesake replacement can hardly be overstated, especially since the opposition is hotting up - Nissan has its Navara on the market, while Ford and Mazda will be introducing the revised Ranger and B-Series in the near future.

Graeme Giles has already contributed a launch report on the new model, having driven it on both tarmac and icky stuff, while Mike Grundon has supplied a road test in which he talked of getting down and dirty with the Warrior. The version described here is also a Warrior, but unlike Mike's it came with an automatic gearbox, and unlike Mike I stuck to civilised road surfaces most of the time. If you want an off-road report, read his; this one is all about the tarmac experience.

The Warrior is the first of the lifestyle L200s - above it come the Animal and the Elegance, while lower down the food chain lurk the workhorse 4Work and 4Life models. All share Mitsubishi's up-to-date styling (the most adventurous among the current crop of pickups) and impressive interior room. They also, regardless of trim level, use the same 2.5-litre turbo diesel engine, whose noise is impressively well-subdued, and which produces 134bhp in standard form.

If you want more power, there's an upgrade to 158bhp, though even in that form the L200's ass is whupped by the Nissan Navara, which gives 172bhp from an engine of almost exactly the same size. But don't assume from this that the L200 feel slow. It feels so un-slow, in fact, that I nearly phoned the Mitsubishi press office to see if the test car had the upgrade fitted, even though nothing in the accompanying literature suggested that it did.

Instead, I did a 0-62mph test and found that I more or less matched the 17.8 seconds quoted by Mitsubishi - and also discovered that a lot of that time is spent persuading the automatic transmission to wake up. From about 20mph, it doesn't half shift. As the old motor racing saying goes, if there really are only 134 horses under the bonnet, they're all pulling in the same direction.

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