Road Icon: The Mitsubishi Delica Leaves Us Starstruck

In 1984, The New York Times asked : “The Five Day Work Week: Can Japan Learn to Love it?” Suffice it to say, Japan was a nation ready for the weekend.

Mitsubishi Motors embraced the moment. The Delica—a contraction for “Delivery Car”—debuted in 1968 to transport domestic goods across the country. There was already a basic passenger van version. The era of growing leisure time saw new generations of the vehicle, including the Delica L300 Starwagon. Then, in 1982, Mitsubishi did something revolutionary, integrating the four-wheel drive of a commercial vehicle into the smoothness of a leisure ride.

Photo Credit: Different_Brian/Getty

“It became this awesome contradiction,” says Ron Arnold, a Delica importer in Sun Valley, Idaho. Here was an eccentric van that was also one of the best off-roading vehicles on the planet. “They realized that people wanted to take them everywhere,” he adds.

The Delica’s low-range four-wheel drive transfer case meant it could handle steep climbs. Japan is, after all, home of Mount Fuji and other snow-capped giants. Other recreational vehicles stopped in the parking lot. “This was the camper van that could drive to the top of the mountain,” Arnold says.

In the coming years, Mitsubishi went all-in on trim packages: from versions with mini-fridges and rear-cab karaoke machines (!) to the ski-themed Jasper and Chamonix editions. The company expanded to New Zealand, Europe, South Africa, even Jamaica—but never the United States.

Photo Credit: Mitsubishi Motors

Arnold was working as a carpenter on New Zealand’s South Island in 2014 when he got his first taste of van life. Space was tight inside his friend’s Delica, but it unlocked adventure. There was nothing quite like it in the US market. “Every other 4WD was either expensive or mechanically inferior,” he says. So, once he got back home, he called a friend in Osaka; 200-some imported vans later, the rest, as they say, is history.

Foreign vehicles that haven’t gotten US regulatory sign-off need to be 25 years old before they can be imported here. As the Delica reached that vintage, it developed a small but avid following. Last year, Mitsubishi teased a concept vehicle, the futuristic D:X, that could be the first version made for the US market. It promises modern comfort and tech and less of the vintage maintenance problem-solving current fans know well.

Even so, it sounds pretty cool.

This article originally appeared in Wildsam magazine. For more Wildsam content, sign up for our newsletter.

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