Yahoo Autos Mitsubishi Will Finally Sell An Overland Delica In The U.S.
If there’s one thing American overland enthusiasts love, it’s the Mitsubishi Delica. You can keep all of your Sprinters, and the NV’s just absurd — the Delica is the apple of our collective eyes. Yet, with registrations of imported JDM vans at risk from local governments, Mitsubishi is finally stepping up with a solution: Bringing an overland Delica to the United States.
We’ve gotten Mitsubishi’s coolest van stateside before, decades ago, but now it seems Nissan has plans to give us a fully off-road-ready variant — just in time for the overland market to get truly saturated. Automotive News spoke with Mitsubishi representatives, who confirmed the van’s return:
The passenger van will arrive toward the decade’s end, according to a dealer who asked not to be identified sharing information from the internal meeting.
The van, one of two outdoorsy models coming this decade, is based on the D:X Concept, a futuristic-looking six-seater plug-in hybrid revealed at the Japan Mobility Show last year.
Mitsubishi has described the concept as having the roomy cabin space of a multipurpose vehicle, the road handling of an SUV and the driving performance of a PHEV.
That D:X concept, which dropped at the Japan Mobility Show last October, is plenty neat even without the Delica branding. Nissan calls it an “electrified crossover MPV,” but it’s not a crossover as we regularly see on the roads. Instead, Mitsubishi claims it’s meant as a cross between “Maximum Space and Safety for Humans” and “Maximum Off-Roader.” If that’s not a factory vanlife candidate, I don’t know what is.
We’ll have to wait until closer to 2030 to get our collective grubby little mitts on the new Delica, but we may start to see more production-ready concepts come down the line sooner. Transparent body panels are likely on the cutting room floor, but those fender flares better stay.
