Smokey Mitsubishis

[Bossxr8]

Originally Posted by TMC

Nothing wrong with the 380. Better build quality than a Falcon actually. They didn't go out of business in Oz because the 380 was a bad car. It was a brilliant car. What killed it was that no one wanted a big family sedan anymore. Sound familiar.

A friend of mine used to work for Mitsubishi, and he kind of explained the story behind the 380 saga. The Mitsubishi factory was churning out less and less units and Mitsubishi in Japan wanted to shut down the Australian operation. The Australian government said, "No, we'll give you umpteen million dollars to continue if you come up with some sort of plan that we can say the money will go too". Now Mitsubishi Japan wasn't going to turn down a big pay cheque from the Australian government. So they designed the 380, a big family car that according to the trend graphs would not sell. Mitsubishi Japan knew it wouldn't sell. It was there plan for it to bomb out. Mitsubishi invested in a factory upgrade with all new state of the art panel making robots etc that made the cars fit and panel alignment top notch. When the 380 didn't sell or boost sales, they shut the plant anyway and sold the Lonsdale plant for umpteen million dollars, which I think went to Holden. So they made a heap of money, which they wouldn't have done if they shut the plant originally.

The moral of the story, great products do not always sell.

I wouldn't go as far as saying it was brilliant, it lacked a lot of things that were considered must have's when it was released, like no curtain airbags and no stability control, but it wasn't a bad car, quality was supposed to be quite good, but I guess when you are making less than 50 a day the workers had all the time in the world to check quality. The thing that killed it before it began was Mitsubishi Japan's decision to kill the long wheelbase export version called PS41L before it went into production, which basically killed Mitsubishi overnight because they were totally relying on those export numbers to make the 380 viable. Once that volume was gone it had no hope.