Mitsubishi 3000 GT – the car world’s greatest misses
Perhaps the defining 'greatest miss' is the 3000GT – 'a lot of awful car for the money'
If you’ve ever wondered about the origin of evo’s dislike for the Mitsubishi 3000GT, the car which prompted the best line I’ve ever read in a car magazine, ‘A lot of awful car for the money’ (credit: P Tomalin), let me take you back to the early ’90s. This was a fertile time for coupes. Indeed, there were so many, we at Performance Car magazine decided a group test was needed to find the very best that £30k-50k would buy. The contenders were the Lotus Esprit Turbo and Venturi 260, Alpine A610 and Porsche 968, and no less than four from Japan: Nissan 300ZX, Mazda RX‑7, Subaru SVX and the 3000GT.
We drove them to Wales and back again and then took them to Millbrook to performance test them. Very early on it became obvious that one of these coupes had turned up to the wrong party, copping flack for its numb steering, ‘interesting’ styling and overblown interior. But we’re not here to talk about the SVX, this is about the 3000GT, which also copped flack for its feel-free steering, chest-wig chariot styling and haphazard, cheaply trimmed interior.
Fans of the 3000GT point out that it was ahead of its time and this is true; it boasted active aero, adjustable damping and four-wheel steer, and it was massively heavy, so predicted that trend too. It wasn’t all negative, of course. The 3-litre, turbocharged V6 sounded classy and delivered a healthy 300bhp. And the wheels were OK, too, round and silvery…
It felt like a car that had started out with the best of intentions but then hadn’t been able to say ‘when’ and been overladen with goodies and gizmos at the expense of basic development. The V6’s performance was class-leading but blunted by a kerb weight of 1740kg and dragged down further by ludicrous gearing – third gear went to 120mph.
There was worse. It wasn’t just that its steering lacked feel, it was also artificially heavy and had an annoyingly strong self-centring characteristic… which was probably there to help cover the torque steer that distracted the front wheels under full power, even though the 3000GT was four-wheel drive. The ride was two kinds of dreadful too, either ‘Tour’ or ‘Sport’, and the gearshift was awkward, first and second being a stretch away.
It didn’t help that the Mitsubishi was surrounded by an amazing, diverse array of rivals: coupes with four- and six-cylinder engines, even a rotary, and front-, mid- and rear-engine layouts, and all of them dynamically rewarding, compelling, accomplished. Of the 3000GT we concluded: ‘Never has so much technology been used to so little effect.’
To those who say that inside the 3000GT there’s a great coupe just waiting to get out, we say ‘Just the one?’ (credit: J Saunders). We really are joking because there was already a Japanese coupe built to a remarkably similar blueprint that was a legend in the southern hemisphere and which we’d driven as a grey import and been hugely impressed by: the R32 Nissan Skyline GT‑R.
Our dragging of the 3000GT didn’t endear us to The Colt Car Company, then UK agent for Mitsubishi cars. When we were preparing to launch evo, they were the only company to bad-mouth us. We made up a few years later when they began to officially import the Evo. Probably helped that we didn’t mention the elephant in the room.
