American fans of the Mitsubishi car family enjoyed a satisfying array of badge choices for their vehicles in the mid-1990s, with the shortened three-door version available here wearing Mitsubishi, Dodge, Plymouth, and Eagle badges. Of those sold as the Eagle Summit Wagon is the hardest to find these days. I was recently able to document this discarded ’93 in a Denver cemetery.
The Eagle brand was created in 1987 by Chrysler following its purchase of American Motors Corporation, as a way to sell ex-AMC products that were not under the Jeep banner. For the 1988 model year, the Eagle line consisted of the Renault-derived Eagle Prime Ministerthe Eagle medallion (Renault 21) And the eagle eagle (formerly known as the AMC eagle and the source of the new brand name). Mitsubishi products soon joined the Eagle team, followed by an Eagle version of the Chrysler LH, known as the Vision. Eagle got the axe after 1998, replaced by… Nothingbecause few car buyers ever knew what the brand stood for. Plymouth followed Eagle into the graveyard shortly thereafter.
When the third generation Mitsubishi Mirage appeared in the United States as a 1989 model, the same car was sold here as the Dodge Colt And Plymouth foal. In order to ensure that Eagle dealers could sell small cars, they were given a version known as the Summit. That’s right, American car buyers could buy Mirages from four different brands at once for extremely similar prices. In practice, they tended to buy the version with the best financing and/or warranty deals at any given time.
The Summit Wagon was a sibling of the Mitsubishi Expo, which itself formed the basis of the Dodge/Plymouth Colt Vista. For the second-generation Summit Wagons, sold for the 1993 through 1996 model years, the Summit Wagon was based on the Mitsubishi RVR, known in North America as the Expo LRV. By this time, the confusion created by all the nearly identical Chryslerbishi minivan-like vehicles didn’t matter much, as American car buyers flakes to trucks a lot of and I didn’t care.
The 1993-1996 RVR/Expo/Summit Wagon/Colt Vista had one door on the driver’s side and two on the passenger side, one of which was a sliding door (in right-hand drive regions, the sliding door was on the left side of the vehicle, while the fuel filler remained on the right side everywhere else).
The engine is the ubiquitous 1.8-liter Mitsubishi 4G64 SOHC four-cylinder.
A five-speed manual transmission was standard equipment; this car is optionally available with an automatic transmission.
Only 135,000 miles on the clock.
They were useful machines, but they didn’t look like rugged trucks and they held less than a minivan.
Unfortunately, Bugs Bunny was not seen in any TV commercials for the US market, and the two-door, retractable Targa Open Gear did not appear at US dealerships either.