Tetsuro Aikawa Mitsubishi Motors President and COO made a series of announcements to further expand on what was stated at the 2015 Tokyo Motorshow.
In this presentation at the company's headquarters in Minato-ku Tokyo, he talked of Mitsubishi's plan to strengthen the line-up of new compact Hybrid (PHEV) SUV's in the 2017 fiscal year.
2018 will bring a new Outlander, the new RVR is planned for the 2019 fiscal year.
Closer to now, the next generation Delica D5 is planned for 2017, along with the introduction of one or more new "compact MPV" vehicles with some production planned for Indonesian Factories.
As a whole the plan is to introduce 14 new car models through the period from 2017 to 2020, with an increased ratio of SUVs and electric vehicles.
The growth in the SUV market of around 20% in the last 4 years and the projected market share of about 60% by the end of this year is behind much of these decisions.
While the Pajero line is due to cease production, a new large SUV is in the works and may yet retain the name Pajero at least in some markets.
Mitsubishi's compact sedan the Lancer will cease development in-house, but development will continue contracted to outside companies including some overseas. Whether this hints at joint manufacturing or shared platforms or not, we'll have to wait and see.
As far as I am aware the next generation Lancer is still due for release later this year or in 2017, but I guess we'll have to wait and see as we have seen many times in the past with Mitsubishi, things can and do change at the last minute.
As for performance vehicles, yes there are things in the works and prototypes have been built, but exactly which direction they decide to go in and what, if anything will be released will again be a case of wait and see, and the general approach seems to be to try and implement any new performance technology into as many models as possible. Mitsubishi is still looking at a shared platform for many of it's new vehicles and is one likely direction manufacturing will take.
In the meantime however Mitsubishi engineering continues the in-the-field R&D via the Offroad Rally program and the Pikes Peak winning electric race cars.
For those of us awaiting the news of a new high performance Mitsubishi, the only real 'given' is that if something performance specific does come out, it will be a hybrid.
日本語はこちら：http://car.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/20160203_742147.html
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