One last Ride
You'd be forgiven for wondering why anyone would make a fuss about the Mitsubishi Evo Final Edition, let alone buy one. It's based on an eight-year-old econocar from an automaker that's constantly on the brink of extinction. Open the door and observe a poorly grained black plastic dashboard disturbed only by a stereo head unit that looks like it's from a Crutchfield catalogue and a "Final Edition" plaque that reminds you Mitsubishi is killing its most famous car rather than updating it. The driver's seat looks like it was plucked from a '95 Galant, and the diminutive black shift knob wears a 5-speed pattern. Yours for the bargain price of $38,805.And yet, as I skitter across a snow-covered dirt road on a Wednesday morning, I'm feeling sentimental. I'd jumped off the highway on my morning commute from Detroit to Ann Arbor to put gas in the Evo's tiny tank (280 miles from full to empty, if you're lucky), and from there got the best kind of lost. When I come to dirt road cutting in the wrong direction, I hesitate only briefly before flinging onto it. I slow to a halt, set the four-wheel-drive system to its Snow setting, let out the clutch, and take off into the white abyss.
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The turbo hits at 4000 rpm and I ride the boost to redline before gently—you can't rush it—snicking the shifter into second. I yank the handbrake to divert into a subdivision and the back end drifts loose just enough for me to have to catch it by flicking its wonderfully tiny steering wheel and hitting the gas. Would this dance have been as graceful without the aid of yaw sensors and torque vectoring? Maybe not. But the Evo lets me feel like I'm leading.
When the Evo was new, we marveled at its computerized four-wheel-drive traction and powerful turbo four. Today there are several cars that accomplish similar feats. What's amazing now is how the Evo keeps you involved. Most modern cars are MP3 players. Easy and convenient, but lacking richness and detail. Driving the Evo is like listening to techno on an old turntable—the output sounds digital, but the inputs are still wonderfully analog. You can still drop the needle and hear it hiss as it hits the vinyl.
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| David Zenlea Like most things from the analog world, the Evo demands trade-offs. Its 303-hp turbo four slurps fuel at the same rate as many V8s; four-wheel-drive components eat up trunk and fuel-tank volume and it dictates a wider turning circle than a Dodge Charger; a huge wing blots out cars in your rearview mirror and says you're the kind of guy who wears Ed Hardy t-shirts. These are good reasons not to pick an Evo over, say, an Audi S3 for your daily driver. But they're also reminders of what we've lost in the quest to have it all. Namely, identity and purpose. We enthusiasts were a tribe once. Driving a performance car used to require a certain amount of sacrifice. We bought cars like the Evo, cars that patently sucked at being cars, because we cared that much about driving them. |
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Sources:
RoadandTrack
RoadandTrack
