Category: Pick-ups 
Price Range: No data available
Visually striking, roomy inside the double cab, best-driving pick-up out there, long list of equipment and accessories.
Ride quality better but not great, short load bed, needs crude power chip to match rivals on performance.
The best pick-up for UK driving conditions. A huge improvement on its predecessor.
The old L200 was hardly the last word in driving pleasure. It was an agricultural truck and felt like it. Mitsubishi has acknowledged these criticisms and worked hard to affect an improvement. A massive increase in the rigidity of the chassis is accompanied by a switch from recirculating ball steering to a rack and pinion set-up. The old torsion bar front suspension has been replaced by a more sophisticated double wishbone set-up.
The improvement is significant. Long journeys are no longer to be feared and local corners can be taken with something approaching glee. But the old SUV problem of unfeeling, ponderous steering remains. It's not as bad as the old one, but you still need both hands to make even gentle turns.
The ride is much better than before, even though it sticks to the pick-up blueprint at the back with leaf springs. Surface imperfections are still exaggerated and that could scupper a test drive for a former SUV owner, but anyone coming out of the last L200 will be in heaven.
A five-speed manual gearbox is standard and it has a nice, positive shift action. A four-speed automatic gearbox is standard on the Elegance, but this has a deleterious effect on performance - the 0-62mph time increases from 14.7sec to a tardy 17.8sec.
One strength the L200 does have over its key competitors is its manoeuvrability. At 11.8m, the turning circle is the smallest in the class. The Nissan Navara, by contrast, requires 13.8m. The L200's smaller size - 220mm shorter and 50mm narrower than the Nissan - also makes it better suited to urban conditions. It will fit in a supermarket parking space, for example.
The ladder frame chassis and a full complement of 4x4 hardware ensure that the L200 is more than capable off-road. But the L200 brings a new trick to the pick-up class. Its rivals and the base models here run in rear-wheel-drive on tarmac, only switching to 4x4 and low-ratio gears in the rough. But the top-end versions have something called Super Select 4WD, which sends drive to all four wheels on the tarmac without gunging up the transmission in corners.
The L200 is only available with one engine, but two states of tune. The 2.5-litre, four-cylinder common-rail turbodiesel is a heavily revised version of the old 113bhp unit, now making 134bhp and 231lb-ft of torque in standard form.
This is enough to push the L200 from 0-62mph in 14.6sec and on to 103mph. It's refined and decently powerful, although it can sound raucous at high revs.
The problem for Mitsubishi is that its key rival, the Nissan Navara, makes 169bhp. The Toyota Hilux 3.0 also manages 169bhp and even the new Ford Ranger and identical Mazda BT-50 hit 141bhp.
Hence the optional upgrade: Mitsubishi has developed its own engine management chip to reprogram the ECU, increasing power to 165bhp and torque to 302lb-ft. Standard on Animal and Elegance Plus models, it's available as an option across the range. It's crude and delivers the extra power in a savage blow, but it gives the lighter L200 the best power to weight ratio and creates a pick-up GTi.
