Mitsubishi is a giant automotive brand in Australia, but for a way for much longer?

Mitsubishi does a wonderful job of selling cars in Australia, which is all of the more impressive given it has withdrawn from China, come near doing the identical in Europe, and is little greater than a distinct segment player within the US.

This can be a brand that didn’t appear to suffer in any respect from ending local manufacturing, unlike Holden.

Purely taking a look at sales numbers from 1991 onwards, Mitsubishi has exceeded 80,000 annual sales five times: twice before 2008, the 12 months it ended local production, and 3 times after that.

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Last 12 months, it delivered 74,574 vehicles in Australia, making it the fifth best-selling brand here. It was much more popular in Recent Zealand, where it sat in third place in 2024.

Much more impressively, it managed that feat with an incomplete lineup of new-generation Triton vehicles, a trio of pretty strange SUVs, plus the far more impressive Outlander.

But yesterday’s news that Mitsubishi is discontinuing its Eclipse Cross and Pajero Sport and eventually replacing its ASX has exposed some key vulnerabilities for the brand.

Because the junior member of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, Mitsubishi has been geofenced under the triumvirate’s ‘leader-follower’ model development strategy.

Its focus is on Southeast Asia, with regions like Europe – a promote it said it would depart and before it backtracked the next 12 months – being an afterthought. “Oh, I assume we’ll stick around. Here, pop our badge on this Renault.”

That led to the corporate launching a brand new, thoroughly modern-looking Xforce small SUV… only to show around and ensure it wouldn’t meet Australia’s tougher – and, as Mitsubishi would argue, often onerous – regulations.

That our market didn’t appear to factor into Mitsubishi’s decision-making isn’t altogether surprising, given we’re only a small piece of Mitsubishi’s pie. The corporate produced over 1,000,000 vehicles globally in 2023, for instance, while selling lower than 75,000 here.

We may love Mitsubishis here, but we’re hardly an enormous market within the grand scheme of things.

Now, an incoming Australian government regulation is forcing Mitsubishi to axe its fourth and fifth best-selling models here, and to switch its third hottest model with a European-souced vehicle that’s almost certain to be costlier and which could also be more supply-constrained.

Don’t get me mistaken, I’m pleased to see the back of the prevailing ASX after 15 years on sale. Replacing it with a rebadged Renault will lead to a higher-tech, more dynamic small SUV gracing Mitsubishi showrooms.

Nonetheless, it still won’t be a category leader and now it’s not quite as secure a selection to recommend to friends or relations who care absolutely nothing about cars.

There’s also the very real query of how for much longer Mitsubishi will keep rebadging Renault products, as a Nissan-Honda merger looms large and will well bring Mitsubishi with it.

Is that this ASX simply a stopgap, and what’s going to Mitsubishi’s lineup appear to be in five years? If Mitsubishi can’t tap Renault, and if its vehicles aren’t engineered for Australia, what’s going to it sell?

We’ve seen Mitsubishi’s shadowy future model teaser, featuring what looks like a new-generation Delica and Pajero Sport plus a smattering of crossovers, however it has yet to share detailed plans for the remainder of the last decade for our market.

Before then, expect a drop in ASX sales with the brand new model, while the lack of Eclipse Cross and Pajero Sport volume can be keenly felt.

Mitsubishi has indicated it doesn’t plan to withdraw from these segments perpetually, however it hasn’t said exactly when replacements will come – apart from that its “several all-new or significantly updated models” will arrive sooner or later by 2030.

This might find yourself being a blip. Mitsubishi has survived the tip of local production, and stayed high within the sales charts during years when it had fairly average products.

It has done this on the back of a fairly solid status for reliability, in addition to pricing that has historically been sharper than that of rivals like Toyota and Mazda.

Will it have the ability to stay quite as strong with potentially costlier and quite different products in its showrooms? We’ll see.