(upbeat music)
(car engine revving)
- Mic check! I don't get sad often,
but I do get sad when things get taken away from me.
I was revoked access to the term at the end of the day
by like you because apparently I say it too much.
I get sad when Baja Blast aren't available
at Taco Lleb anymore, and I get sad,
and I go on like US 441, and all I see are CRVs.
Listen, I get the cargo space,
but the world needs more variety, okay?
It needs more sass, it needs more color,
more socks with sandals.
Less grays, blacks, and whites.
I swear to God if Taylor tells me
that having a truck in gray is a cool looking color,
it's just gonna start a war.
Okay, you wanna know what a cool color is?
Lava orange, not gray, okay?
It's just not something I really wanna do.
But the equivalent to the Baja Blast
being ripped out of our cold dead hands
is happening in the automotive scene.
And today we're gonna be talking about just that.
Just why, just how, and just who dared
to take away the beloved, blocky four seater.
We're going to be talking about just what happened
to the Mitsubishi Evo.
(upbeat music)
It's a jab, rear hand punch.
Roll over.
Knife hand.
And if you're looking for the big boys with the wheels,
the tires, and the suspension, the wheel and tire packages,
be sure to hit us up over at fitmentindustries.com,
where we have our very own things like our very own wheel
brand that we just launched called Artisa ArtFormed wheels.
They're ultra light, they're monoblock.
They're Deco Directional,
meaning they rotate on different on each side.
It looks super nice, and they're super good looking,
and a super focused attention to detail.
That's the plug.
And before you go over there,
please be sure to drop a comment below on what you'd like
to see us talk about next in the next episode.
Oh, what happened?
Let's jump into this 4G foursome.
This big wang wonder, this turbo lag, loving community.
The Mitsubishi Evolution itself.
Evo itself was a car that was alive and well from 1992
until 2016, and for those living under a rock,
the Mitsubishi Evolution was touted as one of the best
performance tuner cars to come out of Mitsubishi,
and likely, dare I say it, ever made.
Throughout its 10 generations of turbo goodness,
the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution offered things
that even my grandmother couldn't offer.
I don't know Betty,
maybe a little less Ace Ventura
and a little bit more unconditional love.
It would've been really great,
especially as I was a child.
And while the introduction to the platform was really just
to show that Mitsubishi was a powerhouse
in both group rally and general automotive racing,
it didn't take long for the Evo to get bit by the bug,
the bug of the macroeconomic steroids of the 1990s,
especially in Japan.
If you're wondering why all the cool stuff came out of Japan
in the nineties,
it's because they had a lot of bloody money.
They just had more than anyone else.
They were just doing good, okay?
Didn't last very long.
That's why you saw a lot of them go away in the 2000s.
The Evo would go from a slightly soft radicalized Galant
to an ever-growing aggressive looking four door sedan
where the front had more inlets, mesh holes, and cut-ins
than I used to make paper planes in third grade.
Look at the 4th-gen specifically,
we're going to jump through a couple of these,
but you had the big old dinner plate headlights that Subaru
stole for the Bugeye practically,
even with the increases of the car's performance
over the years, most notably its fine tuning
of the iconic gorgeous 4G63T,
the community overseas truly began to love
these cars for the capabilities and modification,
ownership, accessibility, and space.
Space is a much bigger deal than you probably think,
specifically with this car because having two extra doors
is pretty damn nice when you live in a country
where just owning one car is hard and expensive enough,
and you really don't have space for one.
You don't really get a three car garage to keep your boxes
like here in the USA, okay?
But each generation of Evolution continue to capitalize on
what it was known for.
Functional power with a strong foundation
and one hell of a turbo.
The fifth generation got some flared fenders to the car,
a big old wing that was ready for takeoff,
and a widened stance that started to cement
the car's presence in a crowd.
I would really tout the evil five is when it really started
to get just a little bit wider,
a little bit bigger,
and it made it just look like it belonged.
The sixth was a short model year from '99 to '01,
which didn't have as much attention,
but still had the classic 276 horsepower and teacup style
fogs versus the predecessor.
It started getting smaller.
They realized you didn't need to put them
all the way down there, but it looked really cool.
Kind of like the Porsche's slant nose.
The seventh generation is where things truly began
to get a little spicy.
Mitsubishi was forced to run in WRC versus Group A
because it got caught with its trousers down
due to the rules about,
but by then the community was well enough established
where it wasn't really a huge hit to the end line
for Mitsubishi.
People already loved the car.
You know, the tail lights,
the headlights, and body style from about a mile away,
and pro tip, it was in Too Fast Too Furious
with Paul Walker doing reverse gear things
that cars like that, just, they shouldn't do.
It's also an Evo seven, not an eight.
Anyway, the Evo eight was God's green gift to earth.
Okay, and Evo introduced the United States market,
which was a big deal, the demand was big.
It was huge.
It was wide and Mitsubishi saw Subaru gobbling up
every little chocolate bunny in the market,
especially in the United States.
It was very popular.
And while the eighth, ninth or 10th generation,
or what we talk about nowadays,
a lot of people thought Mitsubishi was crushing it.
They were doing fairly good.
The Evo wasn't a bad platform.
And every single year,
they really did decide to try and improve it,
make it look better, little sassy, little wider,
little heavier, but you know, it was living large.
And then one day just like your good friend, they just quit.
It just stopped, the D-word, not that.
The discontinuation of the Evo,
it was kind of sad, okay?
Rumors began in March of 2011
after someone accidentally spilled the Bush's baked beans
in an Autocar UK magazine.
And while magazine initially declined at the actual
accusation, they took a couple of years,
but it turns out the little rumor was inevitably true
because they decided a couple of years after
that the Mitsubishi Evo would be discontinued in 2015.
Scary, wow.
Who knew that was going to happen
besides the leak five years earlier?
So what happened,
what exactly happened to the Mitsubishi Evolution?
The one thing that people may not remember about Mitsubishi
is that they've always had an absolutely terrible,
terrible time keeping money in their pocket consistently.
They're like not very good at budgeting,
and through mergers, partnerships, alliances,
and random ideas hijacking their focus,
Mitsubishi has never really been able to establish
a solid, consistently running, and profitable organization.
And this is actually a pretty big deal.
You could trace back some instability back
to the independence and equity stake share
Chrysler gave back to them in the early 1990s,
and then immediately jumped into the alliance
with Group PCA in like 1999.
And then you had MHI, or Mitsubishi heavy industries,
participate at 540 billion yen emergency bailout
of Mitsubishi motors in 2005,
to which Mitsubishi reported with trying to say that nothing
was wrong and that they were just going to keep making more
Evos because that was apparently
like the market segment that they wanted to go after.
Really after 2005 is when they should
have stopped making the Evo.
The vio was temporary because by 2010,
they were marketed essentially and made the seventh largest
vehicle producer, being the fourth largest vehicle
producer just a few years before.
I mean, guys, Mitsubishi was like the Japanese Watergate,
stuff just kept popping up.
There were scandals all over.
You had a scandal in early 2000s.
They had a recall due to a cover up from 1983,
a terrible North American credit deal in 2003,
and a divorce from Daimler Chrysler in 2005.
And they just did not have the best of economic luck.
And if you pair that with the units dropping from
1.6 million in 2000 to sub a million in 2009,
with the recession hitting at the same time,
they ran out of money.
They just didn't have any.
And it took them a long time to even think about
what they were going to do.
In fact, back in 2010,
even if Mitsubishi maintained their annual operating profits
of $322 million, 322 million buckaroos,
it would take them over 20 years to wipe out their
$7.7 billion bailout that they had to go and pay for,
including interest fees, legal, all that sort of stuff.
The diminishing amount of money meant Mitsubishi
didn't have a wide net to throw and ultimately began making
decisions on what platforms to keep and which to remove.
And the Evo trim on the Lancer body was one of those
necessary toenail clips.
It just wasn't a thing that anybody really wanted to do,
but it was the decision that we had to do.
Well, many people claim that this model trim
also has to do with consumer shifting interests.
That's not entirely true with Mitsubishi specifically.
And in all honesty,
they really just didn't have any other option
because they couldn't afford it.
The money wasn't there for it and the production wasn't
there for it,
the international interest wasn't there for it anymore.
And if Mitsubishi truly wanted to survive,
there was really only one drug left in existence
for it to cling on to for the rest of it stays,
and the United States kind of supplied that drug
a little bit like a dealer supplies
a drug to somebody that you really shouldn't
and then they become dependent on it.
And it's just a really bad relationship.
And then it's called SUVs.
I mean, that was really what Mitsubishi did.
And while sports cars are typically lost leaders
in automotive businesses,
Mitsubishi's entire lineup were lost leaders with absolutely
no end in sight.
None of their cars were doing anything.
The USA introduced them to SUVs, and they're like, oh yeah.
Done were the days of turbocharged 276 horsepower goodness.
And in were the days of whatever the Mirage is.
I'm not sure,
but you can't actually get any options on the car,
but you can get it for 14.9.
I don't even know how you can make a car for $14,900.
It is shocking to me that that is even possible or safe.
And the final other reason for the Evo to be dead and likely
remain dead is simply because the market for that type
of car has really passed,
and a turbocharged, four cylinder tuner
with relatively unflattering interior and some flatline
power that hasn't grown too much over time.
Isn't going to hit this audience as much as it did back
in the day, even with the STI.
All right, it had the dedicated fan base.
It had a similar challenge a few years back
and required almost an absolute overhaul
to the interior quality of the car for the sacrifice
of a performance improvement.
And you can look at the horsepower and torque numbers
versus the interior focus improvements.
And you'll see what I mean, specifically with the STI.
Mitsubishi not only sees the fact that they have a hill
to climb and they're at the bottom of it,
and the top of the hill has the likes of the eco-boost
Mustangs and the nice interior STIs,
The Audi A sport models, Focus's, Z's, Supra's, and more,
but it also has to do it in a way with a car they haven't
made and like ever with new value props and new things
that they're just not going to be able to do.
Mitsubishi is a brand that some of us have been blessed
to know during its heyday, from incredible rally machines,
to some of the best performing fastest cars,
both on the drag strip and on the street.
And they're still some of the most well-performing cars
out there with the right driver.
And while the cars are now owned by some of the rare few,
let's still remember these vehicles,
the odds of Mitsubishi returning to the fray without some
sort of collaboration or heavy,
heavy rental influence is likely,
and more honestly, about zero.
It's just not coming back.
But what do you think?
Think Mitsubishi will bring it back,
or do we need to pay some respects to them and go check out
their website 'cause it's really sad.
Let us know in the comments below.
And of course, if you're looking for aftermarket wheels,
tires, or suspension for your newly acquired Evo
or otherwise, be sure to hit us up
over at fitmentindustries.com,
and don't forget you can get wheel and tire packages
in as little as seven days.
And it also saves you mounds on balancing and shipping.
That's all I got.
I'm Alex from Fitment Industries.
We will see you later, peace!