Mitsubishi's evolution: Working for the Japanese brand in the UK

Other promotional partnerships included the Bristol Powerboat Championship, also known as the ‘widowmaker’, owing to the high number of fatalities, and the Badminton Horse Trials (standout moment: bacon butties and champagne in Colt’s huge Winnebago motorhome).

Despite government-imposed import quotas on Japanese cars, Colt always punched above its weight. However, sometimes the pressure could prove too much. One day, my regional manager (together we looked after the south-east and west of England) pulled over in a lay-by, opened his car’s boot and threw all of his company papers into a ditch while declaring that he was quitting.

On another occasion, I was harangued at a regional dealer meeting in a Heathrow hotel by an intimidating London dealer who accused me of favouring a rival with extra Colt automatics. This model was unique in its sector and very popular in the capital. In fact, it was my manager (the one who chucked his career under a hedge) who had fouled up, but I was ordered not to speak.

Not long after, the smooth-voiced, Argentinian boss of a new Colt dealership telephoned, asking me to scrape together some extra Colt Turbos for him (I can still hear his explosive, spittle-filled pronunciation of the ‘b’ in ‘Turbo’). I did my best, but it was a dangerous game to play.

Just how dangerous became apparent when my boss returned from lunch one day and accused me, falsely, of dipping into their allocation of Shoguns for one of my dealers. In front of the sales team, we grappled with each other over the stock books in which new vehicles were logged and allocated. Still, that was nothing compared with the time a senior manager’s wife burst into the boardroom with a shotgun, accusing him of having an affair.

More chillingly, from time to time, a hush would descend as directors arrived in the sales office to coordinate the termination of a dealer. We would listen as the regional manager was instructed to break the news to the dealer principal, count his stock and direct transporter trucks to collect it.

Fortunately, there were happier times, too, such as the occasion we flew to Guernsey in the company jet for lunch and the parties at Siddington House, where I would play the piano. At one of them, the wife of the Colt chairman, who that evening had been given a new Rolls-Royce as a birthday present, quietly professed to preferring my W-reg Mini HL parked outside.

After two years, I moved from headquarters to selling at the Cirencester showroom. Here I experienced first-hand just how popular the Mitsubishi Shogun 4x4, Spacewagon MPV and L300 panel van were. Even so, I was determined to prove that other models – such as the Sapporo sports saloon, with its trick suspension, and the hairy-chested Starion coupé – could sell too, although with mixed success; I was good with customers but terrible at closing deals.

However, I was very pleased one day to take an order for the new Canter truck, the only vehicle in its class with a tilting cab. Pitching for the sale meant demonstrating this function in the industrial estates and business parks of Swindon while trying not to lose my fingers.

And then, one day, Colt and I decided to part company – something to do with my selling a Starion to a chap and having to seize it back from his driveway in the dead of night. I joined a Fiat dealer. It wasn’t the same. I recall gazing over the roof of a Fiat Panda and out the showroom window as a Colt exec zipped past in his Galant. What fun he was having, I thought. Unless he had just thrown his career into a ditch.

The greatest hits

Lancer Evolution: The World Rally Championship’s 1990s Group A era helped transform perceptions of Mitsubishi and Subaru. The rules allowed the companies to shoehorn four-wheel-drive technology into their plodding Lancer and Impreza saloons, and the homologation versions became cult classics. The Lancer Evo’s grey-import popularity eventually prompted Mitsubishi to offer it outside of Japan, but just as it struggled with the new World Rally Car rules in the 2000s, so the Evo’s popularity waned. It was axed after 10 generations in 2016.

Mitsubishi Shogun: The Lancer Evo may have made Mitsubishi cool, but the brand’s undoubted hero car remains the Shogun. The heavy-duty off-roader, launched in 1982, utilised Mitsubishi’s four-wheel-drive technology to great effect, making it a truly rugged rival to the Land Rover Defender and Toyota Land Cruiser. But the high development costs and limited market for 4x4s has stymied efforts to develop a fifth-generation model for when the current version goes out of production – after a mammoth 15-year run – next year.

Outlander PHEV: Some dismiss the Outlander PHEV’s success as purely down to tax breaks, sniffily suggesting you’ll find its charging cables unused in its boot. While that was clearly part of its appeal (it was the only plug-in hybrid to qualify for the £5000 government grant and had a BIK tax rate of just 5%), it’s also a strong, sturdy and hugely practical SUV. And Mitsubishi deserves credit for capitalising on such incentives: larger firms are only now catching up. But those grants are now gone and new PHEVs are flooding the market, so Outlander sales have fallen sharply.

What will happen to the Colt Car Company?

It’s a worrying time for the 210 employees of UK Mitsubishi importer the Colt Car Company and its 1700-or-so directly associated dealership staff, not to mention the myriad suppliers that feed into this 15,000-vehicle-sales-per-year operation.