Shed a tear for Mitsubishi Motors. The Japanese car maker may be next to go down. Deeply in debt, Mitsubishi needs 37% shareholder DaimlerChrysler to bail it out of a $6 billion-plus hole, but it appears DC won't do so, its shareholders having vociferously stated their negative options.
Can you blame them? The Chrysler side of DaimlerChrysler has yet to produce dividends. The vaunted Mercedes brand has taken a beating in quality ratings. Maybach, DC's super-luxury car, failed to meet sales expectations in its launch year. Many shareholders would like the company to drop all its expensive acquisitions and get back to building great automobiles under the Mercedes-Benz brand.
Please understand: Mitsubishi does not make bad cars. But in the USA the company failed to make an impression after years of struggling. Ironically, that may be because it tied itself to the former Chrysler Corporation as a supplier of dual-badge vehicles. Opening a factory in Normal, Illinois, Mitsubishi produced vehicles for itself and for Chrysler, differentiated mostly by name. A Dodge Colt and Mitsubishi Colt were virtually the same, as were the technologically-loaded sports coupes; overloaded, one might say, with features no one wanted, like 4-wheel-steering and all-wheel-drive. Sebring coupes ran on platforms identical to the Mitsubishi Eclipse except for wheelbase.
For Chrysler this was a terrific deal. No need to invest millions when Mitsu platforms did the job. Cash saved by sharing the Illinois factory lines. For Mitsubishi an easy entry to America, and indeed may have been, except that its US marketing team failed to properly establish the brand. Perhaps it wasn't entirely their fault; maybe Japan didn't give it the tools to work with. Whatever... for most Americans Mitsubishi simply didn't exist.
Permit me to offer an example of the Mitsubishi malaise as it affected your About Cars Guide. If you're a long-time viewer, or if you've read my bio, you'll know that I'm a Canadian and produce this site from north of the border. No big deal as our automobile industry is almost totally integrated and, of course, About is international in scope. For many years Mitsubishi ignored Canada, content to sell cars under the Chrysler label.
In 2001 Mitsubishi made a big splash at the Canadian auto show media presentations, as to how it would soon be a heavy hitter here. Nothing happened. Bad timing, said Mitsubishi's people. A year later it was back for another try, with a major press launch at an historic Quebec tourist lodge, where we journalists ate superb French cooking, drove the cars over challenging roads, and listened to inspiring speeches from Mitsubishi's execs. We even tolerated some rap-based TV commercials that later proved to be duds.
The Mitsubishi personnel were good people, devoted to their product. We drove the cars and liked them, wrote flattering reviews. But now, two years on, most of those Mitsubishi execs have been replaced and although some dealerships have been established, one rarely sees a Mitsu product on the road in Canada. The west coast press car allocation has been poorly handled and as of this writing I've no idea where to pick up a test car.
The Canadian market may be smaller, a mere microcosm of the US market, but this experience epitomises Mitsubishi's problem in North America. If the company can't score in Canada, it will never become an American idol.
DaimlerChrysler hopes someone will buy its share in the Japanese company and let it off the hook. That may happen. My guess is that Mitsubishi's cars and factories will be purchased by another automaker and integrated into an existing brand and product line. Then to slowly disappear. That's the way it is these days.
