Review of the Mitsubishi Outlander | On the 10 Again Series

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My car, bless her heart, is old. 2008 and 120K miles old, folks.

She’s steady, she’s trusty, and she gets the job done. But she’s getting up there in miles.

When I was offered a chance to test drive a 2016 Mitsubishi Outlander by DriveShop, I knew my ?Vader Van wouldn’t mind sitting a spell in the garage while I shared the road with someone new.

We took the Outlander with us around town for a week, and up the 10 to Tucson for a road trip. Since road trips are a staple in my family, I knew we needed to get a real test drive to see how it shook out for us.

THE DETAILS

We had a 2016 Outlander 2.4 SEL 2 Wheel Drive 4 door SUV for a week. It was gorgeous and everyone oohed and ahhed when it arrived at the house.

It had a keyless ignition which I was familiar with since my husband’s car has this nifty aspect as well. You have to leave the fob in the car to start it, but you just push a button rather than turn a key.

It got about 27 miles to the gallon, which isn’t too shabby.

It seats seven, but I’d say that’s only accurate if you have two short people for the very back seats. My 5′ 11″ dad climbed back there and said it would be ok for very short trips, but not for anything longer than around town travel.

BELLS AND WHISTLES

This was the first new car I’d had in a very long time and I enjoyed all the updated bells and whistles that it contained. Such as…

• The keyless start as mentioned above.
• The power liftgate. I can’t tell you how much I obsessively long for that sucker on my own vehicle!
• Cruise Control car length indicator. When you set cruise on, you can also set it to slow down and keep you at 1 to 3 car lengths behind the car in front of you. It took a bit to get used to the automatic speeding up and slowing down as you moved through traffic, but overall I liked this feature.
• Blue tooth radio and USB port.

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE

Not much, I’ll be honest here. I enjoyed the speed and zip of this small SUV. I also enjoyed the fact that it was an SUV and not a mini-van! It was a nice change.

I was disappointed in the overall size of the vehicle, however. For my family, we need a bit more leg room in the 3rd row as well as more luggage space. I don’t know if you’ve picked up on this about me before, but I tend to overpack. It’s an illness- that I can’t seem to cure! I’m afraid we’d run into trouble with a vehicle of this size.

On our short trip to Tucson, we had enough room to make due. And the ride was smooth as buttah!

The other negative I see in this vehicle might be region specific: it doesn’t have AC vents in the back of the SUV. In Arizona, this made those hot afternoons pretty rough at first. Thankfully the front AC worked like a BOSS and cooled everyone down quickly, but it was something my kids picked up on immediately.

All that being said, I would recommend this for a family of 5. There is certainly enough room for everyone to enjoy the ride comfortably. Passengers and driver alike won’t find anything to complain about as far as comfort goes in the Outlander.

Have you test driven a car for a week before you bought it? Did you end up buying it?

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