We seem to have a disproportionately large number of Mitsubishi products in our area. In the shop today is a 2000 Montero and an ancient Chrysler Le Baron convertible with a Mitsubishi engine. Because they are a small brand, it can be a real pain getting parts and technical information for them.
The late Seventies was when I started to get interested in cars - and coincidently, that was when Mitsubishi started making inroads into the U.S. market. As an auto producer, Mitsubishi has the unenviable position of always showing great potential and innovative engineering that never materializes into spectacular products or sales. Perhaps they arrived too late on the U.S. market to really gain a presence. Long before Mitsubishi sold cars under their own banner they were a "captive import," having a partnership with Chrysler to sell their products through the Chrysler dealer networks.
When the first gas crisis hit in 1973, Chrysler had no fuel-efficient cars in its lineup or much hope that its engineering team could come up with one. Ford had the homegrown Pinto, and GM, to many people's regret, had the Vega. The late Seventies and early Eighties were the heyday of the Chrysler-Mitsubishi alliance.
Uneasy alliance
By far the most popular of these models was the Dodge Colt. Although there were early variants of the Colt, it didn't really amount to anything until the late Seventies when it was re-engineered into a front-wheel-drive platform in the classic econobox shape. With the base engine, which I believe was a 1.4, and a manual transmission, it got impressive mileage - into the 30-mpg range - and was a far better car than either the Pinto or the Vega, which were still rear-wheel-drive cars.
Sometime around 1980 a new feature, the "twin stick," was added. This clever gimmick gave the car two shifters: the standard four-speed manual trans shifter, and right next to it a second shifter to change the final drive ratio for either "power" (around town or heavily loaded) or "economy" (highway cruising, light loads), which pushed it up into mileage that would be impressive by today's standards.
Although the Colt was available in an automatic it wasn't a good fit. The automatics of the time were balky and bulky, with insufficient gearing eating up much of the performance and mileage and giving them an incurable rough idle. Later a kind of mini-minivan was built on the Colt platform called the Colt Vista. It really could have been a breakthrough vehicle but the engine was never quite enough for it. Honda did a similar vehicle off the Civic, and Nissan off the Stanza platform. The timing must have been wrong because none became big sellers.
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