Unsung heroes: Mitsubishi Space Wagon

For the next instalment in the unsung heroes series, I pay tribute to an arguably significant car that was eclipsed by another and never received the recognition it deserved. Renault's 1985 Espace is widely credited with creating the MPV market sector, but as a purpose-built seven-seat family car it was actually beaten to the market by the Mitsubishi Space Wagon launched the previous year. While the Espace still gets all the glory, the Space Wagon has largely faded into obscurity and is now a very rare sight. This piece is also something of a personal indulgence as my dad owned three first-generation Space Wagons while I was growing up and they played a vital role in my childhood, so I remember them with great fondness.

B252 YGN was said to be the very first Space Wagon in the UK. Here it is outside my parents' house in May 1990.

Seven-seat multi-purpose vehicles may be commonplace today and are practically the de facto standard choice for family transport, but in the early 1990s they were still very much a novelty and sold in small numbers to a niche market. My mum would regularly use the Space Wagon (or "the Wagon" as it became known within the family) for school and playgroup trips and it always drew expressions of amazement that it could carry six passengers, not just from the kids but also from parents and staff, almost all of whom had conventional hatchbacks or estates. The name even sounded cool for those all-important playground bragging rights: "my dad drives a Space Wagon!"

The Space Wagon may not have been the first seven-seater of all, but I believe it was the first to be designed from scratch as existing products were either estates with an extra bench seat that was best suited to children, such as the Peugeot 505, or derived from vans, such as the Toyota Space Cruiser. Its big advantage over rivals was its compact size: it resembled a conventional mid-sized estate car and was similar in length and width but slightly taller to give better headroom for the rearmost passengers, so it would fit in most garages and parking spaces.

Unlike the Espace, whose bulky back seats had to be removed and stored when not required, the Space Wagon's rear bench simply folded up against the back of the middle row, although when it was in use boot space was very limited. Another novel feature that the Space Wagon was never given rightful credit for was a pull-out storage tray under the front passenger seat. Journalists raved about this innovative new feature of the Ford Mondeo on its launch in 1993, yet Mitsubishi had quietly introduced the very same thing almost a decade earlier on a car that had gone out of production before the Mondeo even appeared.
  
In Japan the car was known as the Mitsubishi Chariot and a whole range was available, including diesels, turbos and even a four-wheel drive version, but the UK only ever received one model: the mid-range 1.8 GLX with a choice of automatic or manual transmission, the latter being more common. The colour choice seemed quite limited too as I only remember seeing them in red, white, blue, silver or gold. This first generation was replaced in 1992 by an all-new larger Space Wagon that was much less car-like and nearer the Espace in concept; this was more of a conventional MPV and less innovative than its predecessor and I have no personal experience of it so it is outside the scope of this article. It had a little brother, the Space Runner, that is worthy of an honorable mention as it was closer in size to the original Space Wagon but only had five seats, making it the forerunner to today's popular mini-MPVs like the Renault Scenic and Citroen Picasso.

Motor magazine 21st September 1985. A rave review for B252 YGN after a year's motoring.

A white example, B252 YGN was the first Space Wagon to enter my life and replaced a Talbot Alpine. My dad had to travel some distance to buy this as it came from a private seller in Surrey during 1990. Registered in September 1984, it had formerly been a long-term test car with Motor magazine and was allegedly the very first Space Wagon imported to the UK; in fact it was one of the few registered as a Colt rather than a Mitsubishi as it was built before the importers changed their brand name. Due to its age, it didn't have seatbelts fitted as standard to the rearmost row of seats; only the mounting points were there so my dad had to buy and fit the belts himself, something that seems unthinkable these days.

As part of my research for this article, I was delighted to be able to find and purchase from eBay a copy of Motor magazine that not only featured this very car but was also published in the week I was born, a remarkable coincidence. The Space Wagon was exactly a year old and had covered 24,000 miles in the magazine's long-term test fleet, and left everyone who had driven it impressed. In 1985 a people carrier was very much a novelty and many of those involved had never driven one before, so its versatility came in for a great deal of praise and the initial sceptics were quickly won over. The author could only make minor criticisms, mainly concerning the poor layout of the switchgear and a thirst for oil, although the latter had settled down by the time my dad bought it a few years later. 

The only options fitted to the car were seatbelts for the middle row (these were optional on the very earliest cars such as this but soon became standard fit), and £1000-worth of top-of-the-range Alpine stereo replacing the standard AM-only radio. It doesn't look much now but in the early eighties this was quite something; it was still fitted when my dad bought the Space Wagon and by then must have been worth a significant proportion of the car's value. Resale value was Motor's only major concern as it had depreciated heavily by more than £3000 in a year, presumably because people carriers were still an unknown quantity and so few had become available secondhand that buyers were wary of them. The magazine was very prophetic in predicting people carriers would ultimately take over from estates as the family car of choice, and their overall attitude to the Space Wagon is summed up well by this quote: 

"The Space Wagon is a way of life. The longer you live with it, the more axiomatic this becomes. It moulds your lifestyle in subtle and expected ways, creates possibilities out of nothing. What the Walkman is to environmental noise exclusion the Space Wagon is to personal mobility: you don't have to listen to the backbeat of social conformity, you can do your own thing."

Owners' views were very favourable and mirrored those of the magazine's staff.

YGN was replaced in 1992 by a newer example: E896 MDG was red and was sourced locally from the now long-defunct Barrie Upstone Car Sales of Brackley. Even when still fairly young, Space Wagons didn't often appear on the secondhand market so finding one for sale so close to home was unusual. My abiding memory of this one is its unusual smell: a previous owner had spilled a can of gearbox oil somewhere in the back and no matter how much it was cleaned the smell never went away, so that distinctive aroma of old gearbox oil mixed with velour is forever associated with the Space Wagon in my mind.

E896 MDG with a borrowed trailer collecting the Morris Minor in 1992.

MDG's replacement was something more conventional, a Peugeot 305 estate, but after a few years my dad started to miss the practicality of a seven-seater and decided to buy another Space Wagon. Having tried a second-generation car but rejected it for being so much larger and more cumbersome than its predecessor, it had to be another first-generation. By this time (I can't find a purchase date but it was the late 1990s) these cars were already becoming rare but H883 GMJ was tracked down at a specialist MPV dealer near Kettering. Another red one, it was almost identical to MDG but being a slightly later model had electric windows and mirrors and an additional strip of trim on the tailgate. It had been new to a home for people with special needs and oddly had the rear inertia-reel seatbelts replaced with static ones, presumably to restrain disabled passengers who weren't capable of sitting upright.

The Space Wagons proved to be very versatile tools and were used for a variety of duties. Most of the time they functioned as normal estate cars with the back seat folded up, but this could be deployed in minutes to provide two extra seats, useful on the many occasions one or other set of grandparents also travelled with the family and always a novelty to see in action. With both rows of back seats down, the interior space was not far off that of a small van, which proved invaluable for tip runs and transporting large goods such as fridge-freezers. YGN had been fitted with a towbar by its previous owner, and my dad removed this when he sold the car and transferred it to MDG. When that was sold, the towbar came off again and after a period in the garage found its way onto GMJ too. They usually only towed a small wooden trailer but were occasionally called upon to move something bigger such as a car trailer or caravan, and GMJ also had a roofbox that was used when taking the extended family of six or seven on holiday, given how small the boot was with the rearmost seats in use. 

I don't have a photo of H883 GMJ but there it is behind the coach on a family holiday to Suffolk in August 2000.

All good things must come to an end, and H883 GMJ's time came in 2002, by which time it was eleven years old and parts were becoming harder to find. After a couple of expensive repair bills, including a gearbox rebuild, it was traded in with suspected head gasket failure for a Vauxhall Zafira, in many ways a logical spiritual successor to the first-generation Space Wagon, being very similar in size and concept. The Zafira is still here some 13 years later and may become the subject of a future unsung heroes piece, but I haven't seen a Space Wagon for a very long time and the model must now be an endangered species as it was never especially common to start with.  

It isn't possible to provide an accurate survival rate for the first generation as the DVLA data includes all models of Mitsubishi Space Wagon, but there are just 17 licensed and 19 SORNed Super Space Wagons, as this generation was sometimes but not always known, so considerably fewer than a hundred seems a good estimate. No roadworthy Colt-badged examples remain at all and only two are on SORN. Sadly but inevitably all three of my dad's cars appear to have bitten the dust some years ago, but all did go on to give further use to subsequent owners after he sold them. B252 YGN has been untaxed since June 2000, E896 MDG since February 2001 and H883 GMJ since June 2006. They may be gone but are still fondly remembered by myself and my family.

The best way I can see to end this piece and sum up the appeal of the Space Wagon is to quote David Vivian's final words of high praise from his 1985 review:

"If I had to own just one car, the Space Wagon, hand on heart, would be it."