2020 Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross vs 2021

What's the difference?

Ah, Mitsubishi. When my Dad was buying the three diamonds, it was all Astron engines, high-roofed Sigma wagons and then Magnas and stuff.

The company knew how to make passengers cars, made them here and if you were a bearded Akubra hat type, you bought a Pajero. And if you were a weirdo you bought the wacky little Pajero io, because why wouldn't you?

Times have changed and Mitsubishi has changed with them. Now it's almost all SUVs, the tiddly Mirage everyone seems (thankfully) to have forgotten about and even the Methuselah-like Lancer is no more. I thought that car would never die (yes, it will live on in our hearts, etc.).

The Eclipse Cross came not a moment too soon for Mitsubishi. While the ASX is unaccountably still a strong seller for the brand as is the rather better Outlander, there's a gap there in which Mazda, Hyundai and Toyota (among others) make quite a bit of hay.

Mitsubishi needed to be in that market and to do so, resurrected the name of a late '90s sports coupe (yes, really) and slapped it on a startling-looking SUV. If you're gonna plug a gap, go large, right?

Long before it was cool to take the name of a sports car that was never officially released here and slap it on the rump of a compact SUV (Ford Puma, if you're wondering), Mitsubishi had already been there and done that with a car of its own, the Eclipse Cross. 

One imagines it was so named because Eclipse owners would be terribly cross about what the bods in marketing had done, but it's rather more likely that Cross is short for crossover. At least, that's what they tell me. 

The Eclipse Cross has been around for a couple of years. Originally intended as a replacement for the ageing ASX, people just kept buying the ASX at quite a clip. 

Even in fire and plague-riddled 2020, Mitsubishi shifted more than 14,000 ASXs while the Eclipse Cross managed just under a third of that number. Nothing to be sneezed at, I hasten to add, because when you combine the two, that means nearly one in five small SUVs bought last year were Mitsubishis.