“The 3000GT offers a rather detached driving experience and is simply too big and bulky to feel as truly agile and involving as a sportscar should”
The words of Autocar there, in its August ’92 review of Mitsubishi’s heavyweight high-powered projectile. These are words that I first read as an eleven-year old, and came to define my opinion of the car from that day forth. The learned magazine’s three-star (out of five) rating for the the 3000GT was the ultimate in faint praise, labeling it as an also-ran. Nothing special.
From then to now, my opinion of the car wasn’t improved one jot by the countless examples you see which have fallen on hard times – ‘enhanced’ with big, chrome wheels, gaudy body-kits and aftermarket lamp clusters, the work of successive fifth and sixth-hand owners. This is inevitable when once expensive cars lose their value and find their way into the wrong hands. For two and a half decades, the 3000GT had been swept from my radar by a loud chorus of indifference from experts.
So, was the GTO / Dodge Stealth / 3000GT really as off-message as we’re lead to believe?


This year, Mitsubishi Motors UK brought four ‘heritage’ cars to the annual SMMT driving day, including a Starion and an Evo VI, presumably with a view to reminding the assembled journalists of a time when the marque was associated with speed, power and agility. In fact, of its present UK range only the Outlander PHEV and L200 Barbarian pickup were represented. It came as no shock that the brand’s PR representatives were incredibly glinty eyed to have a Tommi Makkinen edition Lancer among them – Mitsubishi seems to have rather stepped out of the ‘enthusiasts car’ sector for a moment.
I was a little confused that the company had chosen to showcase a 3000GT – a car that never received a particularly glowing review in the UK press. So, what had changed in 25 years? Why should a car that was roundly condemned for being too fat, too overwrought, too complicated to compete, be any different today?
I slipped behind the wheel to find myself immediately comfortable, but facing a dashboard that you’d struggle to call sporty unless irony was your intent. It’s a huge blow-moulded slab of grey plastic, inset with three auxiliary dials at the top of the cliff face, angled to the driver and reminiscent of an old Nissan 280Z. Below these dials and a pair of generic air vents is an HVAC panel I swear I’ve encountered in a minivan, and a wonderful throwback in the shape of a cassette storage rack with red indicators for occupied slots. I last saw one of these in my Father’s ’83 Sierra Ghia.

This is a defiantly non-sporty dashboard. The steering wheel, big enough to raise the gearing were it to be used as a road wheel. is an object lesson in prosaic design – and is eerily similar to that fitted to the Pontiac Firebird in the early 90s. The only control anywhere to be seen that hinted at anything vaguely exciting is a rather tacked-on control box marked ‘active aero’. This system raises and lowers the front air dam and rear decklid spoiler when you exceed 45mph, and cancels if you drop below 25. It’s hard to imagine it actually having any real benefit to the drive – but I left the system active nonetheless in case something amazing happened.
Turning the ignition resulted in a noise that, again, could have come from a minivan. A smooth and entirely innocuous whoop of precision V6 Mitsubishi energy, whizzing almost unnoticeably into life up front. The gearknob, in grey leather, of course, is marked with a 5-speed pattern like any other Galant, and the shift it guards is as smooth and forgiving as to be utterly unmemorable – faint praise indeed. The clutch, too, is docile, easy and more unthreatening than that of a twenty-five year old, 300bhp car has any right to be.

It turns out that 300bhp is a fairly prominent part of the driving experience. The ‘B’ pillars bear almost discreet ‘twin-turbo’ decals, and you don’t notice the presence of those two formidable snails until you provoke them. 0-60mph for the 3000GT is given as 5.8 seconds, a number that isn’t especially clever these days – but which doesn’t quite tell the full story anyway. In fact, when you push the right hand pedal all the way down, you’re reminded of how successfully modern engines have been made to disguise turbo boost – and you’re also reminded just how much fun we’re missing.
Turbos used to be fun. They were once rather naughty little devices, a magical method to extract more power from a limp-wristed lump. Although journalists were quick to criticise turbo-lag (the delay between summoning power and receiving it), as well as noting when an engine has a notable step in power delivery when the blower signs in for duty – I’ve always found the latter rather fun.
The 3000GT feels like a turbocharged car. Very turbocharged, in fact, and it makes all the right noises to confirm it. That 5.8 second acceleration time is made up of a fair deal of lounging around and relaxing before mounting a determined sprint finish. And if you keep it in ‘The Turbo Zone’, things happen quickly, and the 3000GT’s case for existence is made.

It’s possibly no coincidence that the 3000GT was only made available for driving on Millbrook’s high-speed bowl, the alpine-style Hill Route was out of bounds. Although I have little reason to call the car’s steering into doubt, and my brief attempts to upset it revealed viceless handling with very little body roll and no hint of understeer (four-wheel steering is on hand, while clever electronic suspension dampers lurk beneath the strange plastic caps on the bonnet), Mitsubishi wanted to show off its ’90s flagship on roads that paint it in a good light. And so I rolled assertively onto the two-mile bowl, built by General Motors and now enjoyed by the whole car industry as well as scores of lucky bastards with invites from PR departments.
The acceleration was anything but savage, and that’s definitely meant as a compliment. The command to accrue speed is made in a manner no different to a 2.0-litre Galant, a mush of accelerator, a few pushes of clutch and a couple waggles of gearstick, but everything is so much quicker, so much smoother. And with the turbochargers giving their best Darth Vader impression, you’re always aware of just where all the power is coming from. Speed gathers very quickly, so much that our prescribed 100mph track limit arrived in a trice – and with absolutely no drama, but an overwhelming sensation of ease.

Indeed, whether it be the active aero actually doing something, or simply a terrifically well engineered drivetrain, the 3000GT was rock-solid. It was in a narrow percentile of cars that I have felt this secure, this planted to the road at three-digit speeds. And here I found myself reassessing my view of the car. From being a bit of a joke of the 90s, a novelty hit on an album of serious music, it was suddenly a definitive. This is a car in which to go quickly without really trying.
Yes, loads of cars can cruise at 100 these days, many with a good deal less than 300bhp. But few match the GT’s declaration that you’ve only just scratched the surface, and that’s high praise for a car a quarter-century old. At 100, in fifth, the turbos have only just put the kettle on. They’re on duty, but haven’t yet left their chair, let alone done any heavy lifting. An explorative further nudge of the throttle confirmed that acceleration would resume at the same pace I had become familiar with, but I abstained lest I not be invited back. Going faster would, I feel, have not proven anything further.
Coasting down from the ton, I swiveled my head around the cabin and the featureless environs made sense. It’s highly doubtful that any order to ‘do nothing interesting’ was ever given by Mitsubishi’s GTO design director, but I could believe that happening. It’s an interior utterly devoid of charm and style, and as such serves to avoid any distraction from the business of going very fast indeed.
This abnormal display of function over form is exemplified by the electric window button on the driver’s door – if you stab it for express down, the switch skulks at the end of its travel until the window glass reaches is end stop, whence the button then pops out as if to confirm that its job is done. There’s absolutely no reason for it to behave that way, aside from some designer’s insistence. Jolly good too. The 3000GT is clearly a car of principals.
In 1998, Top Gear magazine was still pithily summing the 3000GT up in its reviews section as simply “a garish sports car“. And they weren’t entirely wrong. It’s no shrinking violet, the pop-up lamps were outmoded (and later replaced), the intakes ahead of the rear wheels were overly macho and the proportions were firmly of the old school compared to the gossamer-light Honda NSX. It looked fast, though.

Perhaps Mitsubishi’s design department were issued too simplistic a brief. “Build us a car to be driven fast”. Not exhilarating, not involving to drive, not intellectually rewarding, not ‘the fastest’, just fast. It’s a car that seems to have been designed with only little more passion than you might expect from Mitsubishi’s consumer electronics wing, this week a vacuum cleaner, next week a sports car. Whatever, they nailed it. The 3000GT is very good at going fast.
It’s also criminally misunderstood. The 3000GT isn’t, has never been, a sports car. It’s a car for going very fast in, that’s all. They even called it the GT, an appellation often awarded to motorbikes when they’re too old and fat to mix it with the latest super sports brigade. This is, indeed, a Grand Tourer. You could cross a continent at great speed and arrive, remembering not one jot about any part of the journey. In a sports car this would be of concern, but somehow I feel that it’s what the 3000GT was designed to do.
It’s taken 25 years between reading Autocar’s review and making my own mind up, and I have to say they got it badly wrong. Below is my amended version, which I hope they will adopt:
“The big, bulky 3000GT offers an effortlessly detached driving experience, an escape from the agile, involving feel of a true sportscar, which it isn’t.”

(All images Chris Haining apart from 2nd image belonging to Mitsubishi UK – thanks to that esteemed marque for placing its immaculate 3000GT at the mercy of ham-fisted car writers for the day)