Mitsubishi Motors Philippines chairman Noriaki Hirakata had a small problem during a media briefing on Monday, August 10. He was really excited about their latest model.

Maybe a little too excited.

“Can I talk about the new model this month, by the way?” Hirakata asked his colleagues midway through his presentation.

The answer was apparently somewhere between “not really” and “well, the invitations are already out.”

Hirakata talked anyway.

Mitsubishi is preparing to unveil a long-awaited plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) in the Philippines in roughly two weeks, a model Hirakata described as one of Mitsubishi Motors’ global flagships.

He would not name it, but he dropped a few clues.

The vehicle is expensive. It can use its fully charged battery as an emergency power source during blackouts, with Hirakata saying it could provide electricity for around 10 days depending on usage. And, being a Mitsubishi designed with Southeast Asia’s torrential weather in mind, he said it can handle water depths of around 30 to 40 centimeters.

The clues strongly point toward Mitsubishi’s Outlander PHEV, although the company is officially still mum on what exactly is coming to the Philippines.

Hirakata himself was careful when the Outlander came up later, describing it as an expensive vehicle and saying Mitsubishi would need financing packages to make higher-priced models more manageable for Filipino buyers.

Whatever the mystery model turns out to be, it also points Mitsubishi’s broader strategy of bringing in hybrids first, and pure electric vehicles much later — or maybe never.

Mitsubishi is not rushing into pure EVs

Asked why Mitsubishi was focusing on hybrids rather than battery-electric vehicles, Hirakata alluded to the “low acceptance” of pure EVs.

According to the Mitsubishi Philippines chairman, five to 10 years ago, Mitsubishi and other major automakers expected consumers to embrace pure EVs much more quickly and invested heavily on that assumption. Instead, adoption fell short of what manufacturers had expected, leaving the industry to rethink how quickly it should move away from combustion engines.

“They made huge investments the past five years, only to be disappointed by very low acceptance of pure EV everywhere in the world,” he said.

He said manufacturers have since been putting more attention back on hybrids and plug-in hybrids.

Then there is the charging problem.

“It takes substantial time for us to have a decent charging infrastructure in Philippines,” Hirakata said.

He pointed to Japan as a cautionary tale. Putting chargers in place is relatively easy, he said, but maintaining them is expensive, and finding someone willing to shoulder those recurring costs is another matter.

Mitsubishi’s answer, at least for now, is to offer electrified driving without requiring Filipino motorists to depend entirely on charging stations.

That puts it on a somewhat different path from companies such as BYD and Tesla, which have aggressively built their presence around battery-electric vehicles.

Mitsubishi is not pretending it arrived first. Hirakata acknowledged that some customers looking for EVs have already gone to BYD, but he is betting that six decades of Mitsubishi brand recognition in the Philippines still count for something.

“I don’t believe BYD established the brand over only one or two years,” he said, adding that Mitsubishi was targeting a market share of 20% as soon as this year.

Philippines: a ‘very special’ country for Mitsubishi

There’s another reason Mitsubishi is willing to take its time here. The Philippines is unusually important to the company, and it’s not just empty rhetoric.

Hirakata said the country is Mitsubishi Motors’ biggest market outside Japan and makes a significant contribution to the automaker’s global business.

“This country is very special, very important, and we’d like to commit to this nation for a long time,” he said.

That long game goes beyond importing new models.

Mitsubishi has already committed P7 billion toward its planned participation in the government’s Electric Vehicle Incentive Strategy, under which it aims to locally manufacture a hybrid model by mid-2028. It plans to assemble the vehicle’s battery pack in Sta. Rosa, gradually source more components from Philippine suppliers, and potentially expand the plant beyond its current 50,000-unit annual capacity. – Rappler.com