2025 Mitsubishi Outlander First Drive: Improved But Not How It Needed

Our first drive of the updated-for-2025 Mitsubishi Outlander SUV has us wondering if Mitsubishi has become as cynical as we are about the dreaded midcycle refresh. You know, the typically mild upgrade tossed at a given model between full redesigns. Or, are we looking at the best a car company with a dwindling U.S. presence can do? Whatever the root cause, we must give credit to Mitsubishi for making meaningful changes to the Outlander. Too bad they aren’t the changes we were hoping for.

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The Best Mitsubishi in Years

The Outlander as we now know it first appeared as a 2022 model, and it was the best Mitsubishi we’d seen in years. After a series of vehicles with interiors in a style we’d call “99 Cent Store Modern,” the then-new Outlander was a glimpse of Mitsubishi in its late 1980s/early 1990s heyday, with a classy cabin, smartly tuned suspension, and an all-wheel-drive system that brought back the agility of its storied (and largely forgotten) VR4 models.

That it was based on the competent Nissan Rogue (Nissan owns a third of Mitsubishi) was certainly no detriment. Our biggest complaints about the Outlander were its weird styling, pokey powertrain, and vestigial third row of seats that sounded great on paper but was less useful in practice.

Now 2025 brings us the refreshed Outlander, and if you can spot the exterior changes, which Mitsubishi assures us do indeed exist, then you’re more of a Mitsubishi fanatic than we are. As far as we can tell, the most significant exterior change is that the grille is now attached to the body rather than the hood, which means less chance of tall people bonking their head should they decide to check the oil. In a way, we can respect the lack of exterior modifications, as it’s rare that a styling update ever improves a good design—but whether the Outlander’s design is any good is a matter of opinion. (Ours is that the Outlander is a very strange-looking SUV.)

Inside, the changes are similarly minimal but easier to spot, most notably a center console rearranged for better storage and a bigger wireless device charging pad. More important is what has not changed: This is one seriously posh interior. Mind you, we drove the $43,000 one-rung-from-the-top SEL Premium model, but considering how little SUV 43 grand gets you nowadays, we were impressed. The Outlander is awash in thoughtful touches like padded upholstery on the door panels. Set your elbow on the armrest, and it oozes into the material. Knobs and buttons move with expensive precision, the displays are crisp and clear, and that leather under your butt? It’s the real thing. The attention to detail is impressive.

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You Gotta Hear This New Stereo

During our press preview, Mitsubishi spent a lot of time talking about the stereo. While we’re eager to tell you how the Outlander drives, the new sound system, developed in partnership with Yamaha, is worthy of note. With so many automakers paying for big names to slap on their stereos, we’ve gotten cynical about these pair-ups, but Yamaha is an interesting one. The company has been in the music business for nearly 140 years as a manufacturer of musical instruments and stereo equipment. And this really is a partnership: Yamaha developed unique speakers and software for the Outlander and went so far as to help Mitsubishi redesign the door panels so they’d work better as speaker boxes, with a corresponding improvement in noise, vibration, and harshness.

All Outlanders get an eight-speaker system, and our tester had the optional extra-fancy 12-speaker version. Plenty of stereos have speed-compensated volume—they turn the sound up as the car goes faster—but the Outlander system also retunes the equalizer as the speed rises, plus it adjusts sound levels for the A/C blower. It even compensates for rainstorms based on windshield-wiper activity, “ensuring clear audio even during squalls,” the Yamaha reps told us. We’ve heard some lofty claims in our 75 years of existence, but this one’s a first.

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Outlander Has the Moves

Mechanical changes? Yep, there are a few. Mitsubishi retuned the suspension to smooth out sharp crashes from sudden jolts like manhole covers. The engineers also reprogrammed the electric power steering for a heavier off-center response. We noted the outgoing Outlander’s heavy steering effort—a note, not a complaint. When it comes to steering feel, we are an office divided; some prefer a heavier tiller, others like the wheel to be fingertip-light, and while the Outlander is aimed at the former crowd, it won’t alienate the latter.

This is as good a place as any to note that the Outlander is a remarkably good-handling SUV, especially when equipped with all-wheel drive. We drove the Outlander on some rather challenging canyon roads, and once we got it up to speed—no easy task, more on which in a moment—the Outlander impressed us, clinging tenaciously and keeping its composure. We hit one big midcorner bump we were sure was going to set the Outlander bouncing like a pickup truck, but the suspension arrested the motion and kept the tires firmly planted. That, and the fact that this agility does not come at the expense of ride comfort, is the kind of behavior we expect from a good sport sedan. It may be largely irrelevant for a compact SUV, but it’s a good indicator of solid engineering. Still, agile as the Outlander is, we can’t call it athletic, because last year’s lump of an engine has been carried over for 2025.

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Dammit, Scotty, We Need More Power

Our biggest gripe about the old Outlander was the lack of power, and we’re still griping. The 2025 model gets the same 181-hp 2.5-liter naturally aspirated four-cylinder and continuously variable automatic transmission (CVT) powertrain combo as last year, and man, is it sluggish. Not just sluggish by go-faster car-mag-writer standards, but slow as in, “Am I going to be able to merge onto the freeway without becoming the hood ornament on an Escalade?” We’ll have an Outlander in for performance testing soon, but we’d be surprised if it does any better than the previous version’s 8.6 second 0–60-mph walk.

You can get around the power deficit by opting for the hybrid version, which has a much more useful 248 hp and 332 lb-ft and gets to 60 in 6.5 seconds, but the hybrid won’t get the changes we’ve outlined here until the 2026 model year. (It may get a bigger battery for longer electric-only driving range, as well.) Still, last year’s conventional Outlander outsold the hybrid by a ratio of about 6 to 1, so there’s a good argument for giving the regular Outlander a stronger engine. Surely Mitsubishi has a couple of spare turbochargers lying around the shop somewhere.

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A Third-Row Seat That’s Less Than Useless

Our other major complaint is the third-row seat, which remains unchanged. Though useful for dogs, it’s uninhabitable by humans, at least those with legs. Once deployed, the third-row seats eat up more than two-thirds of the Outlander’s 30.6 cubic feet of cargo space, leaving just enough for a few grocery bags, and the headrests block the view through the rear window. (The optional digital rear view mirror eliminates this problem.) Few compact SUVs offer a third-row seat, and the Outlander demonstrates why. Problem is, you can’t get an Outlander without the third row, and even when the seats are folded, the mechanism takes up interior space and adds to the Outlander’s bulk.

And that bulk is both a positive and a negative. On the one hand, the Outlander reminds us of some of Mitsubishi’s great cars of the 1990s, when they were substantial, agile, luxurious executive expresses that felt a step apart from the cookie-cutter cars against which they competed. The Outlander has that same high-class, heavy-on-the-road feel, which is great right up until you need to merge in with fast-moving freeway traffic.

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A Lot of SUV for the Money

Certainly, we can’t complain about the value. The Outlander starts at a very reasonable $31,140 for the front-wheel-drive ES model, and that includes a fantastic warranty (5 years or 60,000 miles bumper-to-bumper and 10 years/100,000 miles on the powertrain), plus two years of free maintenance, which covers up to three oil changes and tire rotations and one cabin filter change. You already know our thoughts on the leather-lined SEL model; if you want bougie on a budget, it’s the way to go.

Still, we wish Mitsubishi had addressed the Outlander’s biggest problems, specifically the lack of power and a useless third row that could be eliminated (or at least made optional) in order to free up cargo space. We’re happy Mitsubishi hasn’t changed things just for the sake of changing them, but we do wish the company had changed the Outlander where it really needed to be changed.