Start with what the Mitsubishi Debonair is: a 4-door sedan with Petrol engine, built from 1964 to 1999, in the decade that gave the world the pony car and the mid-engined supercar. What it meant takes a little longer. The shape is credited to Hans Bretzner.
How it came about
The Mitsubishi Debonair (Japanese: 三菱・デボネア, Hepburn: Mitsubishi Debonea) is a four-door executive sedan introduced by Mitsubishi Motors in 1964 to serve as their flagship passenger vehicle in the Japanese market. The word "debonair" means gentle, courteous, suave, lighthearted, or nonchalant.
Three distinct generations were available during its 35-year production run until it was discontinued in 1999. The first and second generation models were built mainly for senior level executives of the Mitsubishi Group and affiliated companies, essentially a Mitsubishi senior executive company car made by the motor vehicle division of Mitsubishi.
The hardware
The engine is Petrol engine; other versions carried different engines, listed in the specification table below. On the scales it comes to 1330 kg. Drive goes through a 4-speed Manual transmission / manual (1964–1976) / 3-speed Borg-Warner Borg-Warner 35 transmission / BW-35 Automatic transmission / automatic. The wheelbase is 2690 mm. These are manufacturer figures carried by Wikipedia and Wikidata, not road-test measurements.
Family and rivals
In the Mitsubishi line-up the Mitsubishi Debonair has a clear place: it handed the line to the Mitsubishi Proudia / Mitsubishi Dignity; the factory was Okazaki, Aichi (Nagoya Plant), Japan. The cars a buyer would have weighed it against include the Plymouth Barracuda, the Porsche 911, the Pontiac GTO. Its Mitsubishi stablemates include the Mitsubishi Lancer and the Mitsubishi 360.
Owning one today
There is no federal ownership record for the Mitsubishi Debonair — it predates the complaint database or was never sold in the United States — so MotorJury publishes no running-cost figure for it. For a car of this age the price is set by the collector market and the condition of the individual example, not by a formula.