Mitsuoka Rock Star

This is the catalogue record of the Mitsuoka Rock Star, one of 14 models Mitsuoka Motor has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The record places its introduction in 2018. 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 Mitsuoka Rock Star properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 2010s were the decade electrification stopped being a science project — Tesla forced the incumbents' hand, downsized turbo engines replaced displacement, and the crossover conquered every market. 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 Porsche Porsche Taycan, the Tesla Tesla Model 3, the Tesla Tesla Model Y — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Mitsuoka Rock Star reads like this: the record lists its engine as 1.5 L Skyactiv-G (P5-VPS) DOHC I4; quoted output is 129 hp (1.5 L); kerb weight is recorded at 1080 -; drive goes through 6-speed Skyactiv#Skyactiv-MT / Skyactiv-MT Manual transmission / manual / 6-speed Skyactiv#Skyactiv-Drive / Skyactiv-Drive Automatic transmission / automatic; the layout is Front mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive. Worked together, those figures give roughly 119 horsepower per tonne — the single number that says more about how a car actually moves than any of its parts alone. 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 Mitsuoka Motor story

Within Mitsuoka Motor's own catalogue the Mitsuoka Rock Star sits alongside the K-4, the Mitsuoka Buddy, the Mitsuoka Galue, the Mitsuoka Himiko. The record names the successor = as its predecessor, anchoring one end of its lineage. Design is credited to class = Sports car (S). Assembly is recorded at Japan: Toyama.

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.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

The catalogue records what the Mitsuoka Rock Star was; the ownership database records what it is like to own. MotorJury computes a verdict for every model year the United States federal record covers — complaints, recalls, real economy — refreshed nightly, with no opinions involved. If this car reached the American market, its verdicts are in there.