Mitsubishi Mulling New Mid-Size Sedan and Larger Crossover for the States

It’s been about two years since Mitsubishi took the decision to gradually phase out most of its U.S.-made models by killing the Endeavor crossover, Galant mid-size sedan, Eclipse coupe and Spyder convertible, and the results are what you would expect them to be: the automaker’s U.S. sales plunged 27 percent to 57,790 cars last year.

The last time Mitsubishi reached the 100,000 sales mark in the United States was in 2008, when it had 491 franchises, which have now dropped to a little over 380 dealerships.

Currently, the Japanese carmaker’s U.S. range is limited to the Lancer sedan and hatchback, some remaining 2012MY Galant mid-size sedans, the Outlander Sport, the Outlander (which will be replaced by a new model available in a hybrid variant as well), and the expensive i-MiEV electric hatch. The company also plans to add the new Mirage sub-compact with a three-cylinder engine to its U.S. lineup from this fall.

Needless to say, Mitsubishi is in need of new models in the U.S., and that’s something that Masatoshi Hasegawa, executive vice president of corporate planning for Mitsubishi Motors North America, freely admitted during an interview with Autonews. Hasegawa went one step further saying that Mitsubishi is evaluating plans for the addition of at least two new cars to bolster the brand’s portfolio.

“We are looking into a possibility for the [mid-sized sedan] segment, and we may look into maybe a bigger brother to the Outlander,” he said, adding, however, that a comeback is “not going to happen overnight.” Hasegawa continued: “We went into a descent, so it’s going to take time to get back up again. But I think now we will definitely go into an upward trend.”

Besides the Lancer and its region-specific variants like the JDM Galant Fortis, Mitsubishi also offers the Japanese market-only Proudia and Dignity, which are re-badged versions of the Infiniti M and the China-market Infiniti M35hL LWB (sold as the new Nissan Cima in Japan) respectively.

Hasegawa told the publication that Mitsubishi also needs to develop a successor to the “aging” Lancer compact series, but pointed out that all these changes and additions to the lineup are unlikely to happen before 2015.

Story References: Autonews

PHOTO GALLERY