Mitsubishi never earned a reputation for being particularly safe or unsafe relative to the average vehicle on the market. But, as we covered in a previous Surprisingly Safe post, if you wanted the safest van you could buy in the late 1980s, Mitsubishi was the answer. About two decades later, they would find themselves at the top of their class on safety again, this time in the hotly competitive compact sedan market.
The 2015 Mitsubishi Lancer earned IIHS's Top Safety Pick rating, putting it in the upper echelon of safety in its class for that year. The crash safety of the 2015 Lancer, however, had not been changed since its redesign 8 years earlier. If it was still above-average for 2015, imagine how safe it was for its time when it launched in early 2007.
At that time, $15,090 would buy you a Mitsubishi Lancer DE with the optional anti-lock brakes (and air conditioning, a must-have for the South). For that price, you got something with 5-star NHTSA front and side crash test ratings, Good ratings in the IIHS front, side, rear-impact, and roof strength tests, and an Acceptable small overlap rating. The roof strength test was not introduced until 2 years after this body style launched, and the small overlap, over 5 years, proving how ahead of its time the design was.
Eventually, designs like the 2013-2015 Honda Civic and 2014-2018 Mazda 3 would begin to substantially surpass the '08 Lancer on safety, and by the end of the 2010s, most new small car designs had surpassed it. Still, it took almost a decade for most new designs to catch up, which is no small feat.
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