Mitsubishi Outlander is a mid-sized SUV that delivers

If they could just change one detail, Mitsubishi would have a great vehicle on their hands.

The Mitsubishi Outlander. Picture: Supplied

I was recently told something that shook me to my core. My daughter, a newly minted teenager, declared without obvious malice (I believe cruelty starts to seep from their pores like sebum at this age) that I am not the best driver she knows.

If her preferred chauffeur had been her mother, a woman who drives as if she’s stolen something, divorce might have been on the cards. But no, it turns out the driver who is not only the best she has experienced but makes her feel the safest is a mate of a mate who we sometimes share holidays with, and who has a daughter roughly the same age. He’s one of those King of the Kids blokes, the kind who genuinely seems interested in children who aren’t even his responsibility and is always offering to take them on adventures. Even ill-advised, steep off-road ones, apparently – the kind that has seen my daughter insist on getting out to walk when I’ve been at the wheel.

Now, obviously, there is no way that this fellow is a better driver than me, by any rational measure – he has the kind of man-child mojo that means he’s as likely to avoid being distracted by shiny things when at the wheel as he is to ever shut up for five minutes – and yet my daughter insists that being in his car, a banged-up old Subaru no less, as opposed to the riches I lay before her, feels safer.

Connectivity in the Mitsubishi Outlander.

I recently went on holiday with this ingrate daughter, my wife and another couple, during which we shared not only a car – a seven-seat Mitsubishi Outlander – but some foul malady that struck us down one by one and proceeded to extract our insides from both ends at once. My wife was unlucky enough to fall ill first, at a point where we were more than an hour’s drive over a twisting mountain pass from a bed she could collapse into. One of my very best friends, also a motoring journalist, was in the driver’s seat, but I knew this was my time to shove him aside, save the day – or at least the car’s interior – and impress my daughter.

Many years ago, when my children were small things capable of producing high-pitched yewling sounds that could split stone, I developed a method of driving that involved removing any kind of body roll, pitching or lurching, all the better to lull them to sleep and keep them there. It was smoother than Sade’s voice singing the word “smooth” while balancing butter on her tongue.

Boot space.

The trick is to use every inch of the road (much as a racing driver does, only in a more boring fashion) to avoid hard cornering, and to use the gearbox rather than the brakes to slow down. The question was, would the Mitsubishi Outlander – a hugely popular model in Australia for so long that it could be described as the modern Magna (in the 1990s my friends and I used to estimate how many Magnas we would see on the drive from Canberra to Sydney; the record was 63) – be up to the task?

On the plus side, our Outlander Exceed, a relative bargain at $51,860, boasts a 2.5-litre engine with 135kW and 244Nm, all-wheel drive and a properly chunky-feeling leather steering wheel. It was also more spacious than I’d imagined, fitting all five of us and our luggage (it’s one of the bigger “mid-sized” SUVs on the market). The three in the rear felt quite comfortable, once they had gotten past the awkward placement of the seatbelt connectors, which are set up so that each passenger must explore the buttocks of the person next to them in a thoroughly disconcerting manner before clicking the seatbelt in place.

One of the alleged benefits of CVTs is that they provide better fuel economy.

The ride was also very pleasant, a vital feature in our circumstances, and I was able to keep things smooth by engine-braking thanks to the paddle shifters. Unfortunately, the gearbox they were attached to was of the dreaded CVT (Constantly Variable Transmission) type, which meant that I was filled with furious anger every time it went into droning dull mode, which switched to noisy, whining mode up steep hills.

The great shame is that I genuinely liked everything else about the Outlander; if they could just put a proper gearbox in it, Mitsubishi would have a great vehicle on their hands. Sales figures would suggest that people in the real world don’t give two runny toilet visits about what I think, however.

One of the alleged benefits of CVTs is that they provide better fuel economy, but we recorded 12.5 litres per 100km over more than 500km of driving, as opposed to the claimed 8.1L/100km figure (to be fair, five people and luggage does weigh quite a bit, even if we were all more like sultanas than grapes by journey’s end).

If you want a mid-sized SUV that will deliver you in a smooth fashion, no matter how awful you’re feeling, I’d recommend the Outlander. Not only was my wife grateful, but my good friend’s partner declared that I was a far smoother driver than him – something that will now rile him almost as much as I was riled by my daughter’s dissing my driving.