Until last week we along with many of you were nursing hopes that Mitsubishi was busy finding a way to reinvent the legendary Evo.
Turns out we were wrong. The nail in the coffin of one of the most famously unhinged cars ever to be released to the general car-buying public was delivered by Mitsubishi's CEO Osamu Masuko, who told PH in an interview at the Paris motor show, "We don't have any plans of developing a successor to the Evo."
So there we have it. The dream has died. And yet as recently as March we had been told by the UK MD Lance Bradley that the company was working on a successor, promising us "the most powerful Evo ever." Back in 2011 on a press trip to Tokyo Mitsubishi had been a little more cagey, Mitsubishi executive VP Gayu Uesugi telling us, "We must make another fun-to-drive car, but we can't just make another Evo."
FQ-440 looks like being the last hurrah
Lance Bradley is one of the car's biggest supporters and was instrumental in reviving the current car with a run of 50 of the Evolution X, dubbed the FQ-440 MR. The meaning of Bradley's cheeky 'FQ' prefix is well known, the 440 indicating just how far official tuned up Evos could be pushed. That car is still advertised
on Mitsubishi's site
, so if you've got £50,000 to spend you might just to able to grab the last one - ever.
And what is Mitsubishi going to build instead? "We've decided we're going to focus on electric vehicles and plug-in electric vehicles," Masuko-san told us. A blow, but not a surprise when the current Outlander PHEV is selling well and actually making the company money.
Mitsubishi can't even change its mind without making a very expensive investment. Previous generations of Evo were derived from the humble Lancer, which we occasionally got in its more bread and butter format. But Masuko said the company now won't develop its own replacement but instead build cars on a bought-in Nissan-Renault CMF platform. This is the one that underpins cars like the Qashqai and next-generation Scenic, and not something you could easily install your own S-AWC Super All Wheel Control system onto.
So that's it, end of an era. Farewell then, Evo: the car that taught us the right order for Roman numerals (sadly not beyond X) and never knew the meaning of overpowered or underwinged.