Mitsubishi Outlander and plug-in hybrid Review: Why the base model might be the best…
Outlander offers the simplicity of a reduced powertrain choice, seven seats and is affordable enough for most families. But does it still have the kid-centric chops to be worthy of your shortlist? Or has Outlander lost its way?
Also, should you consider the hybrid?
If you’re in the market for a budget-conscious mid-size SUV with seven seats, you don’t have many options, mostly because all three-row SUVs have gone up in price over recent years.
The larger category of SUV is full of seven-seaters like Kia Sorento, Hyundai Santa Fe, Mitsubishi Pajero Sport, Mazda CX-9 and Toyota Kluger, but they are only just starting to offer a hybrid powertrain and they are expensive. By comparison, the Outlander is less so.
This newer generation of Outlander is bigger than its predecessor, and is actually more like a large medium-size SUV than the rest. It’s closer in size to a Toyota RAV4 Hybrid, which means we’re going to talk about compromise in this review. Mitsubishi has played a smart hand with this vehicle because it offers more than any of the midsize SUVs can, but is at the low end of practicality among the seven-seat crowd. But you can still have it as a plain five-seater only.
Outlander starts at a bit over $41,000 driveaway for the five-seat two-wheel drive and culminates in the Exceed Tourer at $59,000 - this is before heading into the $70,000+ plug-in hybrid range, which is not the focus of this review, but I will touch on it.
I’m going to declare it here that, I think the ideal model grade of Outlander to go for is something like the Aspire if your budget has wriggle room, or the ES if things are pretty tight. The Aspire is about $51,000 driveaway, for seven seats, all-wheel drive, heated front seats, heads-up display, proxy key with push-button start, and wireless charging - there’s more, but this is in addition to the LS at $47.5K.
Obviously, from the Aspire you can decide if you want Exceed with the 10-speaker Bose premium stereo, sunroof, leather seats, paddle-shifters, driver’s seat position memory, row-three climate control and built-in sunshades over the rear doors - for an additional five grand, bringing you to about $56K.
You won’t find a Kia Sorento, Toyota Kluger, Hyundai Santa Fe or Mazda CX-9 offering all the goodies for $56K.
But for the higher cost of those bigger seven-seaters, they don’t go without the legroom like Outlander. So what’s the point of a cramped three-row SUV? Let’s look into that.
The rest of the Outlander range no longer gets a diesel engine, you’re stuck with the 2.5-litre petrol engine Mitsubishi has to share with Nissan and Renault. We’ll explore that in detail below...
DISCLOSURE: BestFamilyCars has tested two Outlanders, the base model ES 2WD for eight days and top-spec Exceed Tourer in late 2022 for nine days; both vehicles were supplied by Mitsubishi Motor Australia Ltd. and included a full tank of fuel. Mitsubishi gets no input into what I report to you here: this review is my honest personal opinion, and I was not paid to review the vehicle.
An inside job
The Outlander is inherently a family-oriented vehicle which is obvious by the use of durable plastics everywhere from the waist down, in the cabin. But this isn’t a bad thing.
Plenty of car reviews punish carmakers for using ugly, scratchy plastics where the reviewer would prefer leather, suede and alcantara. But that’s because they don’t understand the sinister nature of children and their tools of terror.
In recent (let’s call them) discussions with my other half, scratches have been found in the rear of our car, and I have no idea how they got there. Cars scratch, they cop wear and tear when they’re in-use. For Mitsubishi to use durable plastics instead of faux leather, or soft-touch vinyls, that’s a benefit to you when it comes time to clean the car and/or on-sell it. Stretched, torn leather never looks good to the next custodian of your fine child conveyance. Credit to Mitsubishi for having the balls to use the right level of wipe-down plastic coverings where boots, sticky fingers and hard-edged kid equipment run rampant.
The front seats are quite good for a daytrip, but I did have a sore back at the time, so I was handicapped in this area. The second row seat backs are much better for back support than the previous version, but kids in child seats won’t notice. Adults probably will, but they can always walk. They’re good enough without being the best.
I noticed in trying to adjust the driver’s seat in the ES base model the manual slide handle was a bit hard to reach, and having got myself adjusted correctly (bent knees with full left-foot brake pedal extension, bent elbows, hands at 9 & 3 and tilted slightly below my heart) the bonnet profile is kinda cool. It feels like you’re in a burly 4WD (or a cut-price Ranger Rover Sport) thanks to the raised sides and squarer frontal section that drops off like a LandCruiser, rather than sloping downward like the old Outlander.
What this means is you can kind get a good spatial perception about where the front corners of the vehicle are relative to carpark bollards and other vehicles as you maneuvre into position. The electric steering is tuned toward being light, but stops short of lacking too much feel. But on this close-quarter parking note, it is genuinely hard to see out of the rear corner section due to that fat D-pillar up the back.
This impeded visibility isn’t a straight criticism necessarily, it just means you need to take a good look at your surrounding environment on your approach (which you should be doing anyway), and you’ll need to signal your intentions early and clearly so nobody gets the idea they can nip in behind you or duck across quickly, through your blind rear quarter. Happily, Mitsubishi, again on the value front, gives you stuff you actually need in the base model.
Rear sensors are standard on the cheapest model. So in concert with the decent quality rearview camera, front sensors (also standard on ES) and you turning you mirrors out correctly so you can’t see the car down the inside of the mirrors, you shouldn’t have any issues parking what feels like a stocky, chunky SUV.
In the event of someone making it through your Enterprise’s shields and sensor sweeps, auto emergency braking is pretty slick and will jam those brakes on hard to stop anybody getting whacked.
On a +$40,000 SUV, regardless of badge or powertrain, I expect a digital speedometer in 2023 and happily, this new model gets one standard (unlike the old version), along with adaptive cruise control and speed sign recognition. Generally speaking, adaptive cruise is typically reserved for higher echelons in other makes and models, when in fact it’s one of the most important modern safety features.
I think the best Outlander to consider is the Aspire for this reason, because it’s only asking $50K and gets forward collision mitigation (auto emergency braking by another name), adaptive cruise, lane departure warning (although this is one of those love/hate so-called safety features you probably shouldn’t need), auto headlights and rain-sensing wipers, blind-spot warning, lane change assist, rear cross-traffic alert, a 360-degree camera system with front parking sensors, and a throttle-cut system deisgned to avoid accidentally mixing up the brake and accelerator. This last feature is actually called “Ultrasonic misacceleration mitigation system” by Mitsubishi, but we’ll just call it ‘throttle-disconnect’.
If you go up to the Outlander Exceed, you’re adding about $5000 but only getting the panoramic sunroof, Bose 10-speaker premium sound system, black leatherand zone-three climate control, which is all stuff you kinda don’t really need. But obviously if your budget can stretch that far, they’re cool features to have, however unnecessary in the strictest terms. There’s nothing specifically wrong with splurging, by all means.
I just see Outlander as a value package and having row three in this vehicle is not a full-time proposition, so tri-zone climate and fully sick doof-doof aren’t critical to how this vehicle performs. And hey, a top-spec Exceed is going to hold better resale value in the long run - it’ll be more valuable to prospective second-hand buyers someday, so consider that in your financial determinations here.
Now, let’s talk about parking in this thing, because it’s interesting and important.
Outlander’s 360-degree camera does a good job without screaming unimportant warnings at you or redundant information in the graphic display, which is a distinct advantage over something like a Mazda with the camera’s images stitching together in the wrong places on the screen. This happens in the corners, which is exactly where you want the most clarity and spacial information.
The quality of the graphics displayed from the camera are decent enough, certainly up there with the mainstream midsize SUVs, and it doesn’t have those blacked-out corners making a small box around the vehicle in bird’s-eye view. The environment around the vehicle isn’t overly distorted thereby making your job harder.
I value functionality and ergonomics over aesthetics, so it is a distinct advantage over the Mazda CX-5, CX-8 or CX-9 for example, where those blacked-out corners on the 360-degree camera actually make it harder to know what’s in your front and rear corners when parking - the most critical part of low-speed maneuvering. Rearview cameras show us everything in the immediate vicinity directly behind, and your eyes tell you what’s up ahead. But the front/rear corners are the hardest and potentially most likely section of the vehicle to hit someone - or something - while you’re parking, reversing out the driveway or navigating a shopping centre multi-story.
And the highest rate of fatalities among kids and vehicles is in the driveway at home, doing about 10km/h. Mazda’s camera system stiches the front, rear and side camera images together at the corners at a 45-degree angle outward from the vehicle, where you get this distorted warped convergence of two pictures. It kinda looks like the Millenium Falcon or the starship Enterprise going into warp speed.
Anyway, props to Mitsubishi for their camera software integration. Very good. But still room for improvement.
Right, let’s do the boot and three-row seating next. It’s what you came here for.
Driving the old Outlander, you felt like a bus-driver relative to the position of the steering wheel, and the air vents were positioned to either blow warm/cool air directly onto your hands - or straight into your eyes, nose and mouth, no matter how you adjust them. Fortunately, you could alleviate this by pointing the vents upward, so you only felt it on top of your head. This new one is much less ‘in yo face’, I’m happy to report.
And if you get the seven-seat Outlander in the previously-discussed Exceed, you get row-three air vents mounted in the roof with temperature controls. Now, depending on the kids back there, this could be too tempting and simply end up being yet another thing to fiddle with an break. Or it could provide much-needed relief on hot beach days or wintery snowtrips. That’s your call. But it’s something to consider when choosing the model grade for you and yours - keeping in mind you’ll be putting tweenagers and pubescent young high school kids in there, so there’s a good chance they’ll be buried in their Tamagotchi or whatever they’re using now. Vapes?
Anyway, the reason you also need to think carefully about which variant of Outlander to get is because that extra row (which folds 50:50, by the way) doesn’t get ISOFIX child seat anchorage points; only in row two gets ISOFIX points found easily in the crux of the seat. There are no top tether points back in third-row economy either, and only two top tether points in the outboard row-two seats: meaning there’s no centre option because the entire centre armrest doubles as the fold-down centre cupholders.
You might have to delegate if you have slightly older kids and a child seat to accommodate. As far as I can remember, 10-year-olds (and above) kinda love third-row seats anyway, so you won’t be selling ice to Eskimos.
Row two is going to have to slide forward to accommodate kids 10-14yo with actual feet, but it is possible.
You can see in the picture above how far back the seat rail sits relative to the row three seats, which should indicate how cramped it is back there. I’ve used my foot and leg for comparison purposes, and I’m 175cm tall. I’m certainly not a big dude, but I’m not small either. So you will need to slide those row-two seats forward in order to accommodate kids in row three, which is perfectly feasible. Everybody can fit, just, and that’s the point of this vehicle.
The row-two centre armrest/cupholder folds down to reveal an opening which makes occupants on row three feel a lot less claustrophobic. It’s an interesting practicality design choice I quite like because it’s fairly rare for people to put a restraint into that centre row-two seat position anyway, not that it’s even wide enough to allow many restraints to be fitted there.
The row-two seats slide forward in a 60:40 left:right configuration which means in trying to get two people into row three, you’ll need to walk around to the RHS of the vehicle to slide the outboard seat forward. The seat base for row three is fixed into position, so you can’t slide it forward or backward on rails like in row two or row one. Row two seatbacks also fold down in a 40:20:40 configuration.
The headrests for row three can be stowed in the plastic stowage cubby underneath the carpet floor, along with the jack and recovery tow loop. But the entire apparatus can be removed in the event of needing to pack deep into the boot cavity. There’s also a fairly robust and reasonably straightforward series of pull-straps to deploy and collapse row three with relative ease. It’s certainly less clunky than the current-generation Pajero Sport.
While pull-straps might seem agricultural and a bit poverty for collapsing those rear seats, they’re actually quite robust and less susceptible to breakage compared with plastic levers and push-buttons. This isn’t a Bentley, it’s a Mitsubishi, so you’re buying for longevity and durability, not plushness. Having said that, there are release handles in the sides of the boot, but they are quite sturdy.
What you’re looking at here is a seven-seat Outlander with what is best described as a row-three storage solution for its own headrests. If you’re done with row three and need to stow it away, you have to remove the headrests in order to get maximum space in the newly renovated luggage compartment. Row three butts right u-p against the back of row two, and a dedicated ‘floor covering’, which is almost carpet, gets laid out over the top.
You can also remove the plastic storage cubby which also contains the basic jack and towing tools; something you might consider for longer journeys requiring maximum volume for large suitcases etc. But you’d have to ask yourself if it’s a good idea leaving something like the jack or tow loop behind when they might come in handy. Still, you could just stash them individually in the boot’s side wings where they’re out of the way but easily reachable in the event of a flat in the country.
The boot is enormous, which is great. And that’s what you came here for. Here are the dimensions for both the hybrid and the combustion Outlander’s boot.
Floor length to the backseat (with row 3 down if you have it, obviously) is 974mm - so just under a metre. With rows 3 and 2 collapsed, Mitsubishi reckons you get 1.7 metres of load length. Now having said that, we don’t know if that requires the front seats to be slid forward. You might want to check this yourself with a tape measure if you have long bulky things like a large multi-person tent or a big stroller, for example.
Impressively, there’s 1.1 metres between the wheelarches with a maximum width of 1380mm (1.38m) at the widest point which includes the wing area on either side. Vertically, you’re looking at 870mm from the floor to the roof at its highest point before it slopes downward and bulges out to house the rear brake light etc. And with row 3 up, you’re gonna get about 40cm of space before nudging the seatbacks or getting your stuff chopped off by the tailgate — I’m kidding, it stops and opening back up if it detects anything (in the powered tailgate, obviously). If you close manually the tailgate on your stuff, that’s on you.
WHICH TO PICK: WHY THE EXCEED TOURER IS (ALMOST) NOT WORTH IT
The Exceed Tourer has the most gear, but also the biggest pricetag, obviously - which cracks into the $60,500 region once you pay for on-road costs like rego, stamp duty and the rest. When you put the ET up against the Exceed, which is about $3500 cheaper, it lacks the black roof, the sexier two-tone leather trim, heated steering wheel (it’s Australia, remember), driver & front passenger massage seats, heated row two seats, and a pocket on the back of the driver’s seat. But these are all very gimmicky features you don’t really need.
I’ve used a couple of seat massage functions in modern cars and they suck. They just make the seat itself more lumpy and uncomfy over longer distances. And they’re just another bunch of heavy electrical guff that may or may not break.
I’d suggest you’re much better off saving 5K and getting the Exceed if you want most of the modern features without going silly. Because you really do get a lot of stuff in an Aspire variant or the Exceed for well under $60K. Things like satnav, electric seats, all-LED exterior lights w/ auto low-beam, 20-inch wheels, triple-zone climate, proximity keyfob w/ push-button start, powered tailgate, adaptive cruise control & auto-emergency braking, driver knee airbag, wireless Apple CarPlay and (wired) AndroidAuto, DAB+, and a 10-speaker premium stereo system from BOSE which includes a fully sick subwoofer. There’s also a very, very welcome set of rear retractable sunshades for the kids in row two, which is nice. Oh, and you get the big panoramic sunroof, just for that added sunshine in the melanoma capital of the world.
Even stepping back to the Aspire loses you the doof-doof boombox, electric tailgate and the sunroof, the retractable shades and the row-three climate controls (goes back to dual-zone), and instead of leather you get the fancy suede cloth. And goodness, you will have to manually slide and tilt your seats to adjust them instead of using electricity, but the good news is you’ll live to tell the tale of how you saved over $5000 over the Exceed.
But if you’re like a great many Australians right now and money’s tight, there’s absolutely no shame in looking in earnest at the ES. I love base models and this one is such a good example of a reputable brand shoving as much in as possible within reason.
For starters, a five-seat ES Outlander has a MASSIVE boot. And it’s way lighter than the Exceeds and Tourers with their cumbersome driving behaviour and lardy-arsed acceleration. The fuel consumption suffers as well getting a heavier vehicle with more equipment but the same mediocre petrol engine with no turbocharging to make it ultimately less efficient. Mitsubishi states the official fuel consumption is the same, but it’s not, because it can’t be, because of physics.
Buying a base model means your Outlander is going to be a family workhorse, and for roughly $42,000 for the front-wheel drive version, or about $44,500 for the all-wheel drive (perhaps if steep driveways, heavy rain, hilly suburbs are in your world) it’s an absolute bargain. And it really isn’t that hard to close the boot by yourself - it’s fairly light and reasonably well hinged to give you some help.
Compared with a Mazda CX-5 which costs up to $50 grand, Outlander Exceed is several thousand less but offers a boot which isn’t quite as wide. CX-5 is 104.9cm wide between the wheelarches, whereas the Outlander is capped at just under a metre - so call it 5cm, whoop-di-doo. In overall cubic volume, the CX-5 offers 442 litres (or 1342L with second row folded - not that anybody really does that in the real world unless they’re at Bunnings). The Outlander’s 442L and 1608L beat the Mazda, obviously - but you have to evaluate what you appreciate more: outright cubic stowage or creature comfort.
Unequivocally, the CX-5 is a far nicer vehicle to sit in and drive. It’s optimised for tuning out noise vibration and harshness, and puts driver/passenger ergonomics ahead of price competitiveness.
Being cheaper does not make Outlander nasty, in fact its build quality feels particularly good for the price, and Mitsubishi Australia does good customer support.
If I can be anecdotal for a moment, a few years ago on a trip to Sydney from Melbourne, the ASX we’d originally booked to take our stuff from the airport and around had to be upgraded to an Outlander because we simply couldn’t get three adults and an infant, including capsule+base, pram and our sundry luggage and bags in it. Filling every inch or space simply wasn’t gonna work. The five-seat Outlander took everything, with room to spare.
And while we’re talking about that, I don’t think the seven-seat diesel Outlander Exceed at $49k is worth it, especially when you can probably negotiate a top-spec CX-5 down from $51k. You would want to be leveraging the dealer down to about $45 for that budget seven-seat diesel Outlander.
The 991cm of boot length in the five-seat Outlander petrol (preferably the ES +ADAS pack) is probably gonna be the ideal package for those of you with multiple kids on a tight budget.
The value of a five-seat ES in AWD is hard to ignore - especially against the midsize rivals (Forester, CX-5, Tucson) asking more for essentially the same thing…
But this is what’s so good about the Outlander range. You can have pretty much any combination you like. If you’re likely to tow a small trailer or camper, the direct-injection diesel seven-seater can be had for $44k with a six-speed auto and paddleshift, which offers a reasonable (but not class leading) 110kW of maximum power at 3500RPM and 360Nm of max torque between 1500-2750RPM, which is the ideal powerband for hauling three or more heavy, noisy, eating machines and their bikes.
If you can afford the diesel, I suggest getting it, because it comes with a two-tonne braked towing capacity, which is great for anybody living in rural Australia or even the outer suburbs. The petrol engines are only rated for 1600kg. (If you need serious towing, here are four easy, family friendly ute options_)
However, be careful about your payload limits, because when you do the maths and add a towball download limit and Gross Combination Mass, maxing your two-tonne towing limit with Outlander diesel, and adding its 1620kg kerb weight with the 200kg towball download leaves you with 470kg of payload - including everybody and all your gear. Divide 470kg by five (three kids and two adults), that’s 2 x 80kg mum and dad and 3 x 103kg kids and stuff. If mum and dad weigh 90kg each, that’s about 80kg per kid (stuff incl.). Just be careful.
Seven-seat Outlanders come with a space-saver spare wheel, and five-seaters get a full-size spare - unlike the CX-5 which gets a space-saver across the range.
If your family is the adventurous type and is likely to spend a lot for time away from major cities and suburbs, I’d suggest the Outlander’s full-size spare is a serious advantage to consider.
The Mitsubishi also has a slightly tighter turning circle of 10.6 metres, versus the 11m in the CX-5; something else to consider in regards to where you live, work and drive on a regular basis.
POWERTRAIN, PAYLOAD AND PLUGGING IN
If you need to decode the numbers on your prospective new Outlander, here it is. Hold on tight, this is going to get pretty rough.
Outlander has just two powertrain types:
2.5-litre naturally-aspirated four-cylinder petrol making 124kW; or
2.4-litre petrol four-cylinder plug-in hybrid with a 57kWh battery, for a combined 185kW.
But don’t be immediately assuming that ‘more power = more performance’, because (using Exceed Tourer to measure) that additional battery and electric motor adds about 20 percent more weight to an already heavy vehicle at 1800kg with you on board. Going from Exceed Tourer (combustion) to Exceed Tourer PHEV you’re adding 385kg of powertrain, making it a more-than 2.2-tonne midsize SUV once you hop in. And that’s before adding the kids, your wife and their stuff.
However, in top-spec PHEV form, you’re looking at 87kW per tonne in power-to-weight ratio, versus 78 in the combustion-only Outlander. So there is a tangible performance addition to having the plug-in hybrid. But it comes at a significant weight increase, which means cornering will suffer. Exceed Tourer PHEV gets a remarkable 606kg of payload thanks to an uprated GVM (Gross Vehicle Mass) of 2750kg. (If you don’t know, GVM i the maximum legal/permitted weight of the fully laden vehicle.) This is about 11 additional kilos of payload allowed over the combustion-only 2.5 Outlander ET, which has a GVM of 2355kg.
But if you want maximum fuel economy in either powertrain, you’re going to have to forgo equipment and niceties, because they all add weight, which is the enemy of fuel economy. So a five-seat ES PHEV is 2020kg versus the 2145kg of the ET PHEV, and 125kg is baggage significant enough to effect the fuel consumption, including how quickly it depletes the battery. It must do because: physics. A heavier object requires greater force to move it than a lighter one.
It also means you need to make sure that if you do choose the PHEV, the battery needs to be kept charged-up and in-use, otherwise it becomes a gigantic weight penalty for the petrol engine to lug around at the expense of additional fuel - and completely unnecessarily. So again, the hybrid system needs to be in-use, otherwise it becomes a liability.
The petrol engine is fine, without being great. It has adequate power and together with an improved CVT transmission that actually does stuff when you request it.
The petrol-only Outlander will do the school runs quite well, and you'll appreciate its sufficient cruising ability on freeways with kids in the back in relative safety.
The hybrid was, in my view, quite a good thing to use in a variety of driving situations like to the shops, around the suburbs, in heavy rain (benefitted by AWD), and on a day trip to the Mornington Peninsula. Using it entirely in EV mode is a unique advantage for frequent use around town, which you can’t do in a RAV4 hybrid - if 80 per cent of your driving is local, you can notionally do it entirely without burning any petrol.
But there are compromises like towing, which is only 1600kg of braked trailer. Payload drops when you add a trailer because of the towball download, which is limited to 160kg on all variants, PHEV or not.
Also, there’s no full-size spare wheel in either PHEV or combustion models save for the 5-seaters, which is pretty shit if you do lots of regional daytrips here and there. A temporary spare on an on-demand all-wheel drive system is pretty sucky in the wet on a major highway.
If you go for the combustion-only Outlander, you get the choice of front-wheel drive or all-wheel drive, keeping in mind it’s an on-demand AWD system, which reacts to detected wheelspin before engaging the rear wheels. But it biases front-wheel drive. It’s not like a constantly-engaged all-wheel drive system in Subaru Outback for example.
You can have:
petrol 5-seat AWD; or
petrol 5-seat FWD; or
petrol 7-seat AWD; or
petrol 7-seat FWD.
You can only have PHEV in:
5-seat AWD; or
7-seat AWD
But you can’t have PHEV in front-wheel drive. It’s all-wheel drive only for the plug-in hybrid; you just get to choose how many seats. And here’s a tip: if you don’t actually ever need third row seats, a five-seat PHEV Outlander is gonna go much further on a full battery charge than the seven-seat because it’s not carrying an extra 60kg of seating.
Unless you’re specifically allocating about $60K for your next vehicle and you specifically want the multi-role option of a plug-in hybrid, the naturally aspirated petrol Outlander is going to be fine in most driving situations without being particularly excellent in any of them. It’s a bit underwhelming without some kind of turbocharging to improve efficiency, so you have to rev it to kick down a gear and quickly overtake something. And it’s moving a fairly heavy vehicle with a child restraint, kid, partner and a bunch of stuff in the boot. It definitely picks up the pace, but it’s not nearly as smooth as a Sportage or Tucson diesel, and nor is it as punchy as a Mazda CX-5.
This 2.5-litre four-cylinder petrol engine is shared with the Renault Koleos and Nissan X-Trail, meaning it appeals to American and European buyers, but would really be better as either a diesel (because you’d get more energy per unit of fuel), or at least some turbocharging for increased efficiency.
To be perfectly honest, I really don’t think you’re gonna need AWD either. This is because if you want an all-wheel drive five or seven-seat family bus, there are simply better options in terms of performance, dynamic abilities and their usefullness to prospective buyers. But Outlander is an awesome value proposition. The idea is to take the essentials you need and put them into a vehicle that absolutely fits your bill and get it for a big chunk of cash less than the other mainstream rivals.
You want seven seats and a bunch of those key desirable features and you wanna walk out with an additional five grand in your account.
Outlander is 4.7m long, 1.81m wide, 1.71m tall, with 190mm of ground clearance, so consider how well it’s going to fit in your garage, driveway and carport, while also being aware of your local shopping centre or apartment carpark height. These are relatively conservative dimensions, so I can’t see any glaring issues here, but it’s always good to check, especially when it involves kids opening doors into things. Or if you’re starting a new family and have to consider entry and exit for pram/s, capsules and a billion sundry bags just to visit friends two suburbs over. Been there, done that, got the brochure.
In other Outlander considerations, you need to be realistic about whether all-wheel drive is gonna be necessary in your near future.
Have your kids started kindly and camping is a high possibility in the next five years? Or are you about to welcome your first into the world?
Do you live in regional towns or outer suburbs of a metro city where a casual flood or muddy hill are a potential situation? Do you live in a steep area? Maybe your driveway is akin to scaling K2. Then AWD might be worth your while. If everything's flat around you, and you’d rather pour boiling water on yourself than mix it with the mozzie and flies, then save the cash and go front-drive.
And lastly…
If you can’t wait for a new Outlander to arrive in 2024, then most of the medium-sized SUVs are going to do the same job from Hyundai Tucson/Kia Sportage to Subaru Forester, or Mazda CX-5 which is about to be replaced - so get any runout stock at a good price if you like that vehicle. Getting the current mod is not going to be to your detriment. In fact, I reckon it’s the smart move getting the model which has been in service for several years with a pretty drama-free life, which is also where Outlander is at now, it’s been out since late 2022 and has proven pretty good with no big issues.
What the Outlander lacks in the level of refinement found immediately stepping into a Kia Sportage, Mazda CX-5 or even a Subaru Forester, it makes up for in sheer value and practicality.
If you don’t give a crap about how plush your kid-hauler is, of you couldn't give a stuff about drivability or plushness, then Outlander should be the first SUV you look at.
You can have the cheap towing, you can have the torquey diesel, you can have seven seats, or a fairly frugal petrol town car, or you can have the novelty hybrid option (but you have to want a hybrid in order to justify it). The Outlander will do the job, which is what you want.
If you need to belt in a fence post, you don’t use a claw hammer, you pick up the sledgehammer. Right?
Ask me anything about the Mitsubishi Outlander. Curious about the hybrid? What do you wanna know? Send an email to BestFamilyCars.