I can't even begin to count how many repossessed Eclipses I inspected for Mitsubishi finance back in the 90's. To boost sales they would sell cars to people who couldn't afford them, and many of them ended up repossessed. At least the Mitsubishi owners were honest about it though; Hyundai was doing the same thing but when the car developed a problem that the owner couldn't afford to fix they would just drive it out to the middle of nowhere, set it on fire and then report it as stolen. Mitsubishi reliability? I was at their dealer in Berkeley once (incidentally the factory had taken over the store because the dealer was going broke), complaining that the replacement transmission that they had put in our insured's car after accidentally destroying the computer in it was defective, and the service manager pointed to an alternator on the bench and said that it was the 5th factory built alternator that had failed shortly after installation. Also, sales weren't helped by the fact that people of the WWII generation associated the name Mitsubishi with the Zero fighter plane. Pretty much the only good thing ever to come out of Mitsubishi was that great commercial featuring a very talented girl doing a dance with her arms while sitting in the passenger seat.
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