This year, Mitsubishi’s luxury sedan celebrates the 60th anniversary of its birth
It was 60 years ago, in 1964, that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (at the time) launched the Debonair as a luxury car. Since then, the car had a long life of 22 years until 1984, and was called “a running coelacanth”.
For a boy in the 1960s, the Debonair was a dream come true
For me, as a boy in the 1960s, the transition of Japanese cars was exciting and fun. I went to the Tokyo Motor Show when the Kachidoki Bridge was still open, and I really enjoyed spending time with cars. At the time, the twin peaks of luxury cars in Japan were the Toyota Crown and the Nissan Cedric (or should I include the Prince Gloria?). In Germany, they were Mercedes-Benz and BMW. Attempting to enter the market as a third force were Isuzu’s Bellel and Mitsubishi’s Debonair.
And it was the Mitsubishi Debonair that made children realize what a luxury car was. Why? The reason is quite simple: whether it was a Crown, Cedric, or Bellel, they all had taxi cars. In the case of the Prince, the Skyline, which was a low-cost version of the Gloria, was used. For the Debonair, however, taxis did not exist as far as I know (they did exist if you read the press release, but I never saw one in Tokyo).
The Crown, Cedric, and Bellel could be taken if you picked up a taxi in town. Of course, I was not yet in a position to pick up a taxi in town, so when my grandfather asked me to “Hey, pick up a yen-taxi”, I bravely took to the road, raised my hand to the car I wanted to drive and enjoyed the ride, even if it was only a short way. But unfortunately, I don’t remember riding in a Debonair because I had never seen one, and its positioning was that it was a luxury car in my mind.
Mitsubishi’s luxury car project was a paper-thin line for storage
The Debonair went on sale in 1964 (the year the Tokyo Olympics were held). However, the background to this history is detailed by the company history, which states that one wrong move and this car would not have been born. What this means is that, at the time, there was a whirlwind of controversy within Mitsubishi Heavy Industries as to whether or not the company should develop a luxury car. It was at this time that talk of a technical tie-up with Italy’s Fiat came up.
Mitsubishi, which had not yet developed the luxury car field, compared the Fiat 2100, which was sent as a sample, with a domestic car of the same class, and as a result, the Fiat 2100 proved to be several levels superior to the domestic cars of the time in terms of handling, acceleration, quietness, etc. The company worked out the conditions of the tie-up with Fiat and even went so far as to apply for approval from the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. The company even went so far as to apply for approval to MITI. However, MITI was told that only one of the two could be approved because another application for approval had been submitted by the same company, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and that they had to choose between the two.
The car had the feel of an American luxury car.
Japanese cars of the time were strongly influenced by American design, and apart from Toyota, which went its own way, both the Cedric and the Debonair, with their wrap-round front windows, had styling reminiscent of the USA. The Debonair, in particular, was designed by Hans Bretzner, a former GM designer, and this made it seem even more so. Styling-wise, it was said to be reminiscent of the 1961 Lincoln ‘Continental’, and indeed, if you look closely, the details are similar. It’s interesting to see the Ford-style Lincoln resemblance, even though he was supposedly a former GM designer.
