American fans of the Mitsubishi Chariot family enjoyed a gratifying range of badging choices for their vehicles during the middle 1990s, with the shortened three-door version available here with Mitsubishi, Dodge, Plymouth and Eagle badging. Of those, the one sold as the Eagle Summit Wagon is the hardest to find today. I was able to document this discarded ’93 in a Denver boneyard recently.
The Eagle brand was created by Chrysler in 1987 after buying the American Motors Corporation, as a means of selling ex-AMC products that didn’t belong under the Jeep banner. For the 1988 model year, the Eagle line consisted of the Renault-derived Eagle Premier, the Eagle Medallion (Renault 21) and the Eagle Eagle (formerly known as the AMC Eagle and the source of the new marque name). Mitsubishi products soon joined the Eagle team, followed by an Eagle-badged version of the Chrysler LH known as the Vision. Eagle got the axe after 1998, replaced by… nothing, because few car shoppers ever knew what the brand stood for. Plymouth followed Eagle to the graveyard soon after that.
When the third-generation Mitsubishi Mirage showed up in the United States as a 1989 model, the same car was sold here as the Dodge Colt and Plymouth Colt. So that Eagle dealers would have small cars to sell, they got a version known as the Summit. That’s right, American car shoppers could buy Mirages from four different brands at the same time and for extremely similar prices. In practice, they tended to get the version with the best financing and/or warranty deals at any given moment.
The Summit Wagon was sibling to the Mitsubishi Expo, itself the basis of the Dodge/Plymouth Colt Vista. For the second generation of Summit Wagons, which was sold for the 1993 through 1996 model years, the Summit Wagon was based on the Mitsubishi RVR, known as the Expo LRV in North America. By this time, the confusion caused by all the near-identical Chryslerbishi minivan-ish vehicles didn’t matter much, because American car buyers were flocking to trucks en masse and didn’t care.
The 1993-1996 RVR/Expo/Summit Wagon/Colt Vista had one door on the driver’s side and two on the passenger side, one of which was a slider (in right-hand-drive regions, the sliding door went on the left side of the vehicle, while the fuel filler remained on the right side everywhere).
The engine is the ubiquitous 1.8-liter Mitsubishi 4G64 SOHC four-cylinder.
A five-speed manual was base equipment; this car has the optional automatic.
Just 135k miles on the clock at the end.
These were useful machines, but they didn’t look like tough trucks and they couldn’t fit as much stuff as a minivan.
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Sadly, Bugs Bunny didn’t show up in U.S-market TV commercials, and neither did the two-door, retractable targa Open Gear come to U.S. dealers.
