“Why, you might ask yourself, should I buy an Australian-built Japanese car when I can buy the Japanese-built version of the same car?” Autocar wrote on 20 August 1983.
We were talking about the Lonsdale, a masquerading Colt Galant sold from early 1983 to 1984.
Its existence spawned from voluntary export restraint that was agreed between Britain’s SMMT and Japan’s JAMA in 1975 and supported by Harold Wilson’s Labour government.
Intended to protect the UK’s motor industry from rapidly rising market share from manufacturers such as Honda and Toyota, this ‘prudent marketing’ exercise restricted the market share of Japanese cars to 11% at a time when it was predicted to soon reach 20%.
To circumvent this, Mitsubishi, at the time still marketing itself as Colt in the UK, decided to annually import 5000 Adelaide-built examples of the Galant saloon and estate, marketed as Lonsdales and sold through the same dealership network.
The most obvious difference between the two models was the engines. The Lonsdale was available with 1.6, 2.0 or 2.6-litre petrols - Mitsubishi blocks built down under but with some different parts. For example, the 1.6 lacked the balancer shafts of the Japanese-built version and had 81bhp as opposed to 75bhp.
The suspension received softer spring rates for the UK, while the steering was of an 'ageing' recirculating ball design, with power assistance standard on the 2.6.
On the two more powerful models, a five-speed Mitsubishi-built manual was standard, while an Australian-built three-speed automatic was a £400 option.
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A competetive 22.4 mpg...
...from a 102 bhp 2.6. I'd forgotten how poor fuel economy was back then, or perhaps how little power was obtained from burning a certain amount of fuel.
I'd prefer this.
I,d prefer this to a Nissan Juke. Although, to be fair, I would prefer leg amputation to a juke.
Spanner wrote:
That's a fair comment.
It would have been nice had the links been to reviews of its competitors, I clicked on the Mazda 626 link as I owned a contemporary 1985 version and would have been interested to read a test of one.
Lonsdale Mitsubishi
Remember seeing a couple of Lonsdale saloons but never saw any estates, that wasn't the last we heard in Blighty of the products of the Austrailian division of Mitsubishi. I doubt if many remember Mitsubishi's "executive" car the Sigma which was pretty sophisticated but didn't sell well at all.an estate version was built for the Australian market and sold over here for a few years,it was a lot simpler than it's saloon predecessor but was truly cavernous inside and quite powerful as well. Mitsubishi threw in the towel building cars in Oz in 2008 after sales of the Mitsubishi 380 tanked, rather ironically the engine plant in Lonsdale which gave the range it's name is now a recycling centre