Mitsubishi released a teaser image of the new Outlander on Thursday, making good on the summer promise that it would actually continue designing new vehicles. Unlike the recently refreshed Eclipse Cross, the 2022 Outlander will be an entirely new model.
The brand is promising refined, on-brand exterior styling and some modest changes in the vehicle’s overall dimensions. Outlander is supposed to herald in a new design strategy without looking out of place in the existing lineup. While the teaser was too shadowy to offer much help, some light image manipulation on our part has given us a better sense of what the crossover will look like when its global debut takes place in February.
Following its tragic fall from grace in the early 2000s, Mitsubishi has actually been clawing its way back toward relevance in the United States. The brand has seen stable, but modest, growth since 2013 and may be able to continue that trend if it manages to deliver the kind of products that customers respond to. Traditionally that has been competent, sometimes downright enjoyable, automobiles at an impressively low price. However, its current lineup is a rather bland affair, benefiting mostly from playing the odds of being heavy with crossovers.
The series of new products it has planned is supposed to help change that and make Mitsubishi more competitive across the board. While most of these will be revamping of existing models, the company has hinted that it might be ready to test the waters on entirely new vehicles in a year or two. That would seem to indicate it has something secret in development but it isn’t making a peep on what that might be right now.
Yours truly has his fingers crossed for something akin to the Lancer Evolution or perhaps a more fitting successor to the Eclipse coupe. Stranger things have happened — though it remains unlikely, as neither have much of a chance of becoming high-volume products. At the very least, we should get a sense on the brand’s general trajectory with the 2022 Outlander.
“The Outlander is an iconic SUV for the company, so when we developed the next generation model, we took inspirations from our rich SUV heritage to realize a bold and confident styling with a solid stance that excites our customers,” said Mitsubishi Motor Corp. Division General Manager of Design Seiji Watanabe. “The all-new Outlander is the first model epitomizing the new generation of Mitsubishi design and the frontrunner of our design strategy.”
[Image: Mitsubishi Motor Corp.]
