Hot mix helps Mitsubishi to rebound from recall

By ALASTAIR SLOANE

The executives at Mitsubishi in Wellington are looking to the future - it has to be better than the recent past.

Car, bus, and truck recalls in New Zealand are being completed, hire company Budget has just bought 120 four-wheel-drive Pajeros for the snow season, new car and truck sales are up ... and a hot hatchback is in the new model mix.

"It has been a tough few weeks but we are working to ensure that the people who were inconvenienced by the recalls are back on the road," Mitsubishi New Zealand spokesman Philip Dinniss says. "All the procedures are in place.

"Parts for more than 600 recalled trucks and buses have arrived. The buses will be completed before the school holidays are over."

Dinniss said overall sales so far in July were as strong as June (see Good Oil), when a record 141 Mitsubishi trucks were registered.

"It was the best-ever month for truck sales in New Zealand as far as we could ascertain," Dinniss says, "and we searched sales figures back to the early 1970s."

Mitsubishi buyers picked up some good deals last month as dealers offered discounts to keep numbers up in the face of negative publicity over the recalls.

"But I don't think the discounts were any greater than rival car companies were offering," Dinniss says.

The strong sales come as Mitsubishi's beleaguered car division in Japan begins to restructure with the help of $6 billion from its corporate group.

The first post-crisis model is the three-door Colt, codenamed CZ3, which will be unveiled at the Paris motor show in September.

Mitsubishi says it's a stand-alone model that represents a more dynamic expression of the company's "one-motion" design theme.

It is shorter than the five-door model, with a lower roof-line, more sculpted body sections, wide sills, longer doors and teardrop rear quarter-windows.

All exterior panels - except for the bonnet and front bumper - have been individually designed and are not carried over from the five-door.

Mitsubishi NZ marketing manager Ross Cameron does not yet know if the car will be available in New Zealand. "But if it's domestically available in Japan we will certainly try to get it here."

The CZ3 will come with a choice of four engines - three petrol, one diesel - depending on the market.

New Zealand would almost certainly go with the one with the most oomph - the four-cylinder 16-valve 1.5-litre unit.

This engine is under the bonnet of the five-door Colt, which has been on sale here since last year. Naturally aspirated, it produces 72kW at 6000rpm and 132Nm of torque at 4250rpm. But in the top model three-door Colt CZT it gets a turbocharger and intercooler to boost output to 110kW (150bhp) and 210Nm of torque.

Mitsubishi says the five-speed manual CZT sprints from zero to 100km/h in under eight seconds and on to a top speed of 210km/h (130mp/h).

The CZT was designed and developed by Mitsubishi's European division "to create a sharp and chic car which blends together all the best elements of Mitsubishi's motor sports and engineering heritage along with its new design style".