Mitsubishi, hot of the back of awards success with its Outlander Plugin Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) is planning to introduce at least two more plugin variants in the next three years.
The Outlander PHEV picked up both the Large SUV Of The Year award and the Innovation award at last week's Association of Professional Motoring Press (APMP) awards, held at the Powerscourt Hotel in Wicklow. Now it looks as if both the smaller ASX crossover and the larger Pajero SUV will also come in plugin form.
The new ASX is due in 2016, and will be a key model for Mitsubishi in Europe – the current car is its best-selling European model, having sold 22,000 units so far this year. The Outlander is just behind on 20,000 units but almost half of these have been the PHEV model, which scores a 44g/km Co2 rating. it uses a combination of a 2.0-litre petrol engine and a rechargeable battery stack with a maximum fully charged range of 50km, but it's not yet known if that precise power train will be carried over to the other two models.
While it would likely be a straight-fit to put it into the next ASX, the larger Pajero would likely need a larger, torquier petrol or diesel unit to give it decent performance. The current Pajero, although updated, has been around for more than a decade now, and a plugin hybrid version could be just the thing Mitsubishi needs to re-kindle interest in what was once its best-known model, but it won’t arrive until 2018 at the earliest. This year, Mitsubishi launched a tax-break special edition of the current Pajero, called the Pajero Business, which uses the enormous boot space of the passenger version to qualify for 13 per cent commercial rate Vehicle Registration Tax (VRT).
Mitsubishi (which often doesn’t get credit for being ahead of most car makers when it comes to the electric revolution) reckons that plugins have already become well accepted by European car buyers, and potentially offer a quicker, easier route to transport electrification than do pure electric cars. At the Paris motor show last week, it showed a sharper-styled, more ’premium’ looking version of the Outlander PHEV which should go into production next year.
