1997 Mitsubishi Eclipse Gst Turbo 2 Door Hatchback on 2040-cars

Auto blog

The last Mitsubishi Evolution in the US sold for $76,400

UPDATE: The final Mitsubishi Evolution, Final Edition number 1,600, sold at auction for $76,400. The proceeds will go straight to Feeding America Riverside | San Bernardino and Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County in celebration of Hunger Action Month. While we're sad to see the Lancer Evolution disappear, we're at least glad to see that the last one on our shores will do some good for those in need. Mitsubishi announced that the very last Lancer Evo X Final Edition for the US, number 1,600, will be auctioned on eBay for charity. The auction starts tomorrow at 9 am Pacific time and runs until Thursday, September 15 at 9 am. Considering the car's collectability and auction availability, the last Evo will probably go for well above MSRP, but that's a good thing. All of the proceeds will be donated to Second Harvest Food Bank in Orange County and Feeding America in Riverside and San Bernardino, so the higher that bidding reaches for this particular car, the better. Aside from the charitable and collectible reasons, the Final Edition Evo is also the best version of the classic sport compact Mitsubishi has built. It has an extra 12 horsepower over standard and comes with the five-speed manual transmission. Plus it gets upgraded Bilstein shocks, Eibach springs and Brembo brakes. So if you want to buy the last, best version of a great car and help people while doing it, log into your eBay account this week and put in your bid. Related Video:

Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV's US debut pushed back yet again [UPDATE]

UPDATE: The story's been updated to include a response from Mitsubishi. Better late than never, the saying goes, and when it comes to the US debut of the Mitsubishi Outlander Plug-in Hybrid, the key words are "better" and "late." The crossover's debut in the US has already been the subject of a number of delays, and it is will once again having its stateside debut pushed back by a few months, according to Green Car Reports. Instead of a springtime arrival, we're now looking at late summer. We already know that the first US Outlander is an updated model compared to the one currently sold in Europe and Japan, but the Japanese automaker is apparently still tweaking the model to make it better suited for US driving. That means an improved interior and better sound insulation for what will be the 2017 model-year Outlander PHEV, and will likely involve better performance for both drivetrain power and fuel efficiency. "We decided to bring in the Outlander PHEV along with the 2017 Outlander launch," Mitsubishi spokesman Alex Fedorak wrote in an e-mail to Autoblog. "Doing so will allow us to better equip the vehicle for the US market." We doubt major changes are in store, so it still looks like the plug-in Outlander will pair a 2.0-liter gas engine with two electric motors. The crossover PHEV can go about 32 miles on electricity alone, at least, it can on the more lenient European driving cycle. The Outlander PHEV was first slated for a 2014 US debut, but that was pushed back to 2015 because of a battery shortage. More recently, Mitsubishi said this past January that the US debut would take place in April 2016. Overseas, the model continues to make headway when it comes to global market share of plug-in vehicles. Through November, Mitsubishi moved more than 36,000 units of the Outlander Plug-in Hybrid worldwide. That puts it third among plug-in vehicles, trailing only the sales of the Tesla Model S and the Nissan Leaf electric vehicles, according to EV Sales. Featured Gallery Plug In 2014: Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV View 12 Photos News Source: Green Car ReportsImage Credit: Copyright 2015 Sebastian Blanco / AOL Green Mitsubishi Hybrid

Here are a few of our automotive guilty pleasures

It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway. The world is full of cars, and just about as many of them are bad as are good. It's pretty easy to pick which fall into each category after giving them a thorough walkaround and, more important, driving them. But every once in a while, an automobile straddles the line somehow between good and bad — it may be hideously overpriced and therefore a marketplace failure, it may be stupid quick in a straight line but handles like a drunken noodle, or it may have an interior that looks like it was made of a mess of injection-molded Legos. Heck, maybe all three. Yet there's something special about some bad cars that actually makes them likable. The idea for this list came to me while I was browsing classified ads for cars within a few hundred miles of my house. I ran across a few oddballs and shared them with the rest of the team in our online chat room. It turns out several of us have a few automotive guilty pleasures that we're willing to admit to. We'll call a few of 'em out here. Feel free to share some of your own in the comments below. Dodge Neon SRT4 and Caliber SRT4: The Neon was a passably good and plucky little city car when it debuted for the 1995 model year. The Caliber, which replaced the aging Neon and sought to replace its friendly marketing campaign with something more sinister, was panned from the very outset for its cheap interior furnishings, but at least offered some decent utility with its hatchback shape. What the two little front-wheel-drive Dodge models have in common are their rip-roarin' SRT variants, each powered by turbocharged 2.4-liter four-cylinder engines. Known for their propensity to light up their front tires under hard acceleration, the duo were legitimately quick and fun to drive with a fantastic turbo whoosh that called to mind the early days of turbo technology. — Consumer Editor Jeremy Korzeniewski  Chevrolet HHR SS: Chevy's HHR SS came out early in my automotive journalism career, and I have fond memories of the press launch (and having dinner with Bob Lutz) that included plenty of tire-smoking hard launches and demonstrations of the manual transmission's no-lift shift feature. The 260-horsepower turbocharged four-cylinder was and still is a spunky little engine that makes the retro-inspired HHR a fun little hot rod that works quite well as a fun little daily driver.