If there’s one thing American overland enthusiasts love, it’s the Mitsubishi Delica. You can keep all of your Sprinters, and the NV’s just absurd — the Delica is the apple of our collective eyes. Yet, with registrations of imported JDM vans at risk from local governments, Mitsubishi is finally stepping up with a solution: Bringing an overland Delica to the United States.
We’ve gotten Mitsubishi’s coolest van stateside before, decades ago, but now it seems Nissan has plans to give us a fully off-road-ready variant — just in time for the overland market to get truly saturated. Automotive News spoke with Mitsubishi representatives, who confirmed the van’s return:
The passenger van will arrive toward the decade’s end, according to a dealer who asked not to be identified sharing information from the internal meeting.
The van, one of two outdoorsy models coming this decade, is based on the D:X Concept, a futuristic-looking six-seater plug-in hybrid revealed at the Japan Mobility Show last year.
Mitsubishi has described the concept as having the roomy cabin space of a multipurpose vehicle, the road handling of an SUV and the driving performance of a PHEV.
That D:X concept, which dropped at the Japan Mobility Show last October, is plenty neat even without the Delica branding. Nissan calls it an “electrified crossover MPV,” but it’s not a crossover as we regularly see on the roads. Instead, Mitsubishi claims it’s meant as a cross between “Maximum Space and Safety for Humans” and “Maximum Off-Roader.” If that’s not a factory vanlife candidate, I don’t know what is.
We’ll have to wait until closer to 2030 to get our collective grubby little mitts on the new Delica, but we may start to see more production-ready concepts come down the line sooner. Transparent body panels are likely on the cutting room floor, but those fender flares better stay.