Following up on the Trail Edition, a more rugged Mitsubishi Outlander is coming soon.
If you looked at this year’s Mitsubishi Outlander Trail Edition and thought “eh”, there is more on the horizon. That’s what Mitsubishi announced Tuesday, calling this new SUV an “off-road-focused variant of the Outlander SUV”. This variant will arrive in late calendar year 2026, and the company noted some of the details on what we can expect.
Starting off, we apparently aren’t just looking at a standard Outlander with some aspirational adventure-minded badging. This car, says Mitsubishi, will actually see “off-road specific bodywork” as well as unique drive modes and “performance upgrades”. The automaker didn’t go into detail on what either of those elements actually means at this point, but for most that’s meant different front and rear bumpers for better departure angles, different suspension setups and chunkier all-terrain tires, at the very least.
Naturally, even the off-road Outlander model — it doesn’t have an official name yet — will use the company’s Super All-Wheel Control (S-AWC) system at its core. It’s banked on that system as a selling point for its SUVs, though we’ll have to wait and see what tweaks Mitsubishi’s engineers give it to make it more dirt-worthy. As much as I’d love to see some sort of turbocharged spiritual successor SUV to the legendary Lancer Evolution series, “performance upgrades” likely won’t translate to the engine itself.
Odds are, the off-roady Outlander will still use the same 2.5-liter, 181-horsepower Nissan four-pot as the standard car, mated to a continuously variable transmission. A naturally aspirated engine yoked to a CVT may not sound incredibly exciting for a so-called rugged SUV, but Subaru gets away with it with the Crosstrek and Forester Wilderness, so a bit of extra ride height and some new tires may be all it takes to offset a relatively sleepy powerplant.
We’ll still have to wait a bit for more details, but this confirms a more rugged Mitsubishi is coming. I asked whether this model would replace the Trail Edition in 2026 or not, and got “TBD” in response, so the automaker may still be working out the finer details. This isn’t the only car on the company’s roadmap, either, as it also plans to launch a battery electric car — essentially a Mitsubishi verison of the new Nissan Leaf — next summer.
