Mitsubishi Lancer

The Mitsubishi Lancer is one of 168 Mitsubishi models in the MotorJury library, the catalogue that sets out to hold every car ever made — production, prototype and concept alike. The record places its introduction in 1973. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Mitsubishi Lancer properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1970s were the decade the oil crises rewired the industry — emissions rules, safety bumpers and fuel economy suddenly mattered as much as horsepower, and Japanese manufacturers went global. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Volkswagen Volkswagen Passat, the Lancia Lancia Stratos, the Jeep Jeep Cherokee — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Mitsubishi Lancer reads like this: the record lists its engine as Petrol engines: / 1244 cc Mitsubishi Orion engine#4G11 / 4G11 Straight-four engine / I4 (A171A) / 1410 cc Mitsubishi Orion engine#4G12 / 4G12 I4 (A172A) / 1439 cc Mitsubi; kerb weight is recorded at 895 -; drive goes through 4-speed manual / 5-speed manual / 3-speed automatic; the layout is Front-engine, rear-wheel-drive (1973–1987) / Front-engine, front-wheel-drive (1982–2024) / Front-engine, four-wheel-drive (2007–2017). Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Mitsubishi story

Within Mitsubishi's own catalogue the Mitsubishi Lancer sits alongside the Mitsubishi 360, the Mitsubishi L300 wagon, the Mitsubishi 380, the Mitsubishi 500 (1959). The record names the Mitsubishi Colt 1200/1500 as its predecessor, anchoring one end of its lineage. Design is credited to Aldo Sessano of Carrozzeria Fissore / Fissore (design) / Rakuzo Mitamura (engineering). Assembly is recorded at Japan: Okazaki, Aichi / Okazaki (Mitsubishi Motors#Locations / Nagoya Plant) / New Zealand: Porirua / Todd Park / Philippines: Cainta / Thailand: Laem Chabang (Mitsubishi Motors Th.

On the record

For the years the United States federal record covers, EPA-rated economy comes in at 30 mpg combined, which works out near $3,800 a year in fuel at current prices.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

From catalogue to ownership

What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Mitsubishi Lancer costs to live with — that is a different dataset. MotorJury's ownership verdicts are computed from federal complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, published per model year as the nightly ingest reaches each car. If this model was sold in the United States, its years will surface in the ownership database; browse it live or price any car yourself with the true-cost calculator.