27 Oct 2016 – Driven To Write

The Big Ask 4: The Carisma’s Stablemates

In our final instalment we look at the Carisma’s showroom companions in Mitsubishi’s dealerships. What were they?

According to Car magazine’s GBU, all of them belonged in the Chump section. The Colt cost least, at just under £10,000. Another three thousand bought you a Lancer with one engine available. You’d need to offer roughly another one and a half thou more to drive off in the Galant 1.8 Si which had a 1.8 litre four, a 2.0 litre four, a 2.0 litre V6 and a 2.5 litre V6. The Sigma came as a saloon and an estate and the price of entry was nearly double that of the Galant: 30K in old money. Continue reading “The Big Ask 4: The Carisma’s Stablemates”

The Big Ask -Third Attempt

Remarkably unremarkable. It’s not much of an epitaph but it’s probably better than ‘Born in Sittard-Geleen’*

There’s always something irritating about an object which fails to live up to the promise of its name, which is one of the reasons the Mitsubishi Carisma annoys me. To be honest, I’d have preferred to have maintained a Carisma-free silence on the subject, but since we’re doing this as some mad thought experiment, here we are.

Continue reading “The Big Ask -Third Attempt”

The Big Ask – A Second Try

This is the third of five items today which look more closely at a rather special car, the …. um, whatsitsname.

It's no goog, I still can't see it - image ; migatuning.com — It’s no good, I still can’t see it – image : migatuning.com

Imagine yourself stranded on that hypothetical desert island. With nothing else, you start playing intellectual games. Game 56 is carving in the bark of a large tree the name of every car that you can remember. Will you ever, even if you live for 1,000 years, come to the Mitsubishi Carisma? Continue reading “The Big Ask – A Second Try”

1995-2004 Mitsubishi Carisma Paint Options

In its nine year career, the Carisma had a range of colour options.

The launch colours of 1995 were bright and included a popular metallic bronze. As the century drew to a close monochrome predominated. The 1995 dark metallic green is hard to show in a colour chip so I presented a larger image. In general dark green is an unflattering colour which is why it is not often seen. The green tends to read as black in many lighting conditions. Not shown is the vibrant IKB colour of the middle years. Continue reading “1995-2004 Mitsubishi Carisma Paint Options”

The Big Ask

This item begins a special one-day series devoted to the Mitsubishi Carisma. During the series we will look at the car from a variety of angles. First, the overview…

The story of the 1995 Mitsubishi Carisma serves as a sterling example of why timing, as much as the product, influences a car’s chances at the showrooms. A lot of the criticism fired at the Carisma takes aim at the car’s lack of visual drama. While it is true the Carisma didn’t break new ground so much as smooth it over, to think that the car’s carefully conservative appearance is the reason for the lacklustre performance is to miss the sharper point. Read on to find out several rather surprising things about this cherishably overlooked car… Continue reading “The Big Ask”