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Scrapyard Gem: 2008 Mitsubishi i

YORK, England — The mainstream EV is still a bit too young to be easy to find in the car graveyards I frequent (though I have documented a few, including Toyota's RAV4-based competitor to the GM EV1), but I remain hopeful that I'll run across a discarded Mitsubishi i-MiEV during my junkyard travels. This might be difficult, since Mitsubishi sold just over 2,000 examples of the short-range electrified kei car in the United States before discontinuing its sale here in 2016. However, I managed to find one of the i-MiEV's gasoline-fueled brethren in a knacker's yard across the Atlantic: a Mitsubishi i. Yes, I traveled to Northern England in January with the primary goal of visiting one of only two American-style self-service scrapyards in Great Britain (that's what they call them over here): the U-Pull-It in York, which is owned by Dallas-based Copart. You'll be seeing many interesting discarded vehicles from that all-too-brief trip, so be sure to check in here regularly. The i (there ought to be an international treaty forbidding the use of a single lower-case letter as the designation for a vehicle model, as well as vehicles with punctuation marks in their names) was built from the 2006 through 2013 model years. Supposedly its name refers to the pronunciation for the Japanese word for "love." In order to meet kei standards in its homeland, it was fitted with a rear-mounted engine displacing just 0.659 liters. It appears that the internal-combustion-powered i was built only in right-hand-drive configuration, so Mitsubishi limited exports to drive-on-the-left places such as Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Kingdom. The MSRP for a new 2008 i in the UK was GBP9,084, or about GBP14,173 after inflation (that's about $17,992 in 2024 dollars). It seems that the i was just too weird-looking and too slow to appeal to many British car shoppers. Today's Junkyard Scrapyard Gem was one of a mere 303 examples of the Mitsubishi i exported to Europe. The i was available only with a four-speed automatic transmission. The engine compartment refused to open, and I grew tired of beating up my frozen fingers trying to force it open in the 29°F chill of North Yorkshire on a January morning Â… so here's the best shot of the turbocharged DOHC three-banger I was able to get.

Mitsubishi planning high-performance Outlander PHEV under revived Ralliart banner

Mitsubishi is finally getting some of its mojo back with its redesigned — and competitive — Outlander. The company reportedly plans to build on that momentum with a high-performance variant of the SUV, bolstering its newly revived Ralliart performance division in the process.  Wait, a non-luxury performance SUV? Well, if any company can pull it off it would be Mitsubishi. It has the history of its WRC victories and Paris-Dakar Rally dominance to build on. Nearly its entire racing heritage has been forged on dirt, not tarmac, so a hotted-up Mitsu SUV doesn't seem so farfetched.  According to Japan's Best Car magazine, the all-out Outlander will be based on the Outlander Vision Ralliart concept shown over a year ago at the 2022 Tokyo Auto Salon. The model will supposedly be called the Outlander PHEV Ralliart, and will feature extensive tuning to set it apart from the standard version. Best Car reports that the chassis will be reinforced to increase body rigidity. Mitsubishi will also strengthen the suspension and visually distinguish it with unique aero bits. What that may be isn't specified, but the Auto Salon concept had wider fenders in front and rear, a new front grille and bumper, and big diffuser beneath a redesigned rear fascia. The concept also came with larger rotors and six-piston calipers in front. The Outlander PHEV Ralliart's drivetrain, says Best Car, will based on the 2.4-liter plug-in hybrid setup on the base car. However, combined power between gasoline and hybrid systems will total an estimated 286 horsepower. Finally, the magazine predicts that the Outlander PHEV Ralliart will arrive in 2024. Japanese pricing is approximated at JPY5.5 to 6.1 million, which converts to $40,300 to $44,700 at current exchange rates, but we expect it to be closer to the high end of that range. With crossovers and SUVs as the de facto car these days, it was only a matter of time before mainstream marques began souping up such daily drivers. If Honda can create an 800-horsepower CR-V race car, a sports Outlander seems only natural. We'll just be here waiting for the first crossover racing league. Related video: This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings.

A car writer's year in new vehicles [w/video]

Christmas is only a week away. The New Year is just around the corner. As 2014 draws to a close, I'm not the only one taking stock of the year that's we're almost shut of. Depending on who you are or what you do, the end of the year can bring to mind tax bills, school semesters or scheduling dental appointments. For me, for the last eight or nine years, at least a small part of this transitory time is occupied with recalling the cars I've driven over the preceding 12 months. Since I started writing about and reviewing cars in 2006, I've done an uneven job of tracking every vehicle I've been in, each year. Last year I made a resolution to be better about it, and the result is a spreadsheet with model names, dates, notes and some basic facts and figures. Armed with this basic data and a yen for year-end stories, I figured it would be interesting to parse the figures and quantify my year in cars in a way I'd never done before. The results are, well, they're a little bizarre, honestly. And I think they'll affect how I approach this gig in 2015. {C} My tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015 it'll be as high as 73. Let me give you a tiny bit of background about how automotive journalists typically get cars to test. There are basically two pools of vehicles I drive on a regular basis: media fleet vehicles and those available on "first drive" programs. The latter group is pretty self-explanatory. Journalists are gathered in one location (sometimes local, sometimes far-flung) with a new model(s), there's usually a day of driving, then we report back to you with our impressions. Media fleet vehicles are different. These are distributed to publications and individual journalists far and wide, and the test period goes from a few days to a week or more. Whereas first drives almost always result in a piece of review content, fleet loans only sometimes do. Other times they serve to give context about brands, segments, technology and the like, to editors and writers. So, adding up the loans I've had out of the press fleet and things I've driven at events, my tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015, it'll be as high as 73. At one of the buff books like Car and Driver or Motor Trend, reviewers might rotate through five cars a week, or more. I know that number sounds high, but as best I can tell, it's pretty average for the full-time professionals in this business.