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Filed under: Coupe, Performance, Mitsubishi


Forgive us for being wistful, but there was a time when Mitsubishi coupes and sports cars were the downright awesome. The 1990s brought us the all-wheel drive, turbocharged Eclipse GSX and the twin-turbocharged 3000GT VR-4 (seen here). The times, they were good.

Fast-forward to today, and the Lancer Evolution exists as Mitsubishi's sole, true performance offering. Mitsubishi killed off the Eclipse last year, by which time it had lost much the luster of its predecessors. With an affordable Japanese sports car fomenting underway thanks to Scion FR-S and Subaru BRZ, one may think that it's an ideal time for a brand like Mitsubishi to jump back into the performance coupe game. A rear-drive Mitsubishi sports car to take on the could be just what the brand needs.

Not so, says Osamu Masuko. The president and executive director of Mitsubishi told reporters at the Sydney motor show, "Our engineers are very prominent to investigate new technologies, but to use that technology they are not that good to bring the revenue to make that money." Read: the engineers want to do it, but the company does not find it to be financially responsible.

Masuko stated that the only way to justify the cost is to implement platform sharing, "We have to identify if it is really feasible economically, we are thinking of just sharing just one platform to achieve various models."

Unlike Toyota and Subaru, which shared the burden of developing an all-new vehicle, any automaker going it alone would shoulder the full weight of development costs. Though Masuko denied any current work on a new sports car, the Mitsubishi boss did not rule out the future possibility, "I won't say no to a small sports car but that the moment we have not decides on a particular model."Mitsubishi denies plans for Toyota/Subaru rival sports coupe originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 23 Oct 2012 13:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.


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