Another crap review (Video: Doug Demuro reviews a 2015 Mirage CVT)

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Following on from the Doug Mirage review. If you want a reliable car for that kind of money and aren't an enthusiast, why would anyone not just buy a 3-5 year old Corolla instead?

Where DeMuro actually defends the Mirage:

DeMuro almost had me here...right up until the last half of the last sentence.

That half a sentence isn't entirely untrue, it's just entirely untrue in 2017. Back in the late 1990s Mitsubishi ran a promotion where you could walk into a dealership and drive out in a new car with "Zero Down, Zero Interest, and Zero Payments for a Year".

Sounds great, right? Well, it brought lots of people into Mitsubishi dealerships. Even today you hear snarky car commentators saying, "Mitsubishi sold 300,000 cars a year in 2000...what happened??" They sold that many cars because of financing offers like this!

The problem, as Mitsubishi Motors North America found out, was that not everyone was as credit-worthy as they assumed. People were faced with that first payment a year in and the new car smell was gone, they had decided they didn't like the car anymore, didn't need the car anymore, their financial situation had changed, whatever. People defaulted by the tens of thousands. This left Mitsubishi with thousands and thousands of repossessed year-old cars with 20,000-30,000 miles on them that were worth nowhere near what was loaned on them. In fact, Mitsubishi had not gotten one thin dime for them yet. It was so bad that the mother company, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, had to give a major financial bailout to MMNA. Truth be told, the company has never really recovered in the US.

Believe me, Mitsubishi learned their lesson here. They won't throw a $15,000 car loan at anyone who can fog up a mirror anymore. And despite what Mr. DeMuro wants to think this is not why the Mirage is selling as well as it is.

When I went to buy my Mirage in late '14 I applied for financing through Mitsubishi. My credit was...'meh'. Not good, not bad. They turned me down. Three months later my girlfriend also bought one and also tried to finance through Mitsubishi. Her credit was pretty good...think 730-ish. We were both surprised when they turned her down, too.

I urge Mr Demuro to send someone with less-than-stellar credit into a Mitsubishi dealership just to see if they walk out with factory financing. They won't.