The Overachiever

There is a very good argument, and you have probably had it, possibly at volume, possibly in a parking lot after midnight, that the stretch from the early 1990s to about 2003 was the high-water mark of the sports car. There was just enough technology to deliver real performance and not so much that it came between you and the road. You could still feel the tires. You could still hear the engine rather than a speaker's impression of one. The cars had tangibility, feel, an old-world honesty that has since been engineered out.

Japan built a remarkable share of those cars, and everyone has a favorite, usually for a reason that makes perfect sense to them and none at all to anyone else.

For many, the Honda NSX is the king. It changed the way sports cars are made. It went up against Porsche, Ferrari and Lotus and moved the standard for quality and reliability, proving that owning a sports car did not mean keeping it on a shelf, polishing it, taking it down only when it was not raining and, in the meantime, putting your mechanic's children through school. The Mazda RX-7 is the purest of them: the archer, the scalpel, the one you drive when you need to find the smile on your face again. The Nissan 300ZX, known to its fans as the Z32, is the legend with a family tree. The Z started the whole Japanese sports car story in America with the 240Z, then refined it through the 260Z, the 280Z, the 280ZX and the first 300ZX, all the way to the Z32, the twin-turbo 300ZX that everyone now covets. The Toyota Supra was the athlete that did it all: sprinter, grand tourer, handsome and practically unbreakable. And the Skyline GT-R was the jack of all trades that turned out to be master of all of them, too. The R32's engine, all-wheel drive and chassis did not so much beat the competition in Japanese touring car racing as delete it, winning all 29 races it started there. An Australian magazine named it Godzilla, the R33 carried the name forward, and nobody has called it anything else since.

Then there was the GTO, or the 3000GT, depending on which side of the Pacific you bought it. It was the most technologically advanced of the lot, and it was, unmistakably, the grand tourer of the bunch: all-wheel drive, four-wheel steering, twin turbochargers, active aerodynamics, electronically adjustable dampers and an exhaust you could ask to behave. Before 1991 you could not walk into a dealership and buy all of that in one car. It was the sort of list you read in a motor show brochure and assumed would arrive sometime around 2010.

It was also the heaviest, the most complicated and, for 35 years, the most misunderstood of the class. This is a love letter to it anyway. Especially anyway. A great many people adore this car. Count this magazine among them.

The One That Had Everything

Line the great Japanese GTs of the era up by what they carried and the pattern is hard to miss. Every rival picked a lane. Toyota and Mazda chose twin turbos and rear-wheel drive, then spent their energy on balance and lightness. Honda chose a mid-mounted, naturally aspirated V6 and an aluminum body. Nissan gave the Skyline GT-R all-wheel drive and rear steering, which America was not allowed to buy, and gave the twin-turbo 300ZX four-wheel steering, which it was. Mitsubishi looked at the menu of available technology and, with the confidence of a company whose surname also appears on the side of rockets, ordered one of everything.

Six for six. Nobody else managed more than three. That table is the overachiever's report card, and it explains both why people fell for the car and why the purists kept their distance. More equipment means more weight, more to go wrong and more to explain. It also means that, for a few years in the early 1990s, the most advanced sports car you could buy in an American showroom wore three diamonds on its nose and cost roughly what a Corvette did.

Three Diamonds, Two Badges

The 3000GT was born inside one of the more interesting marriages in the car business. Chrysler had held a stake in Mitsubishi Motors since 1971 and had been selling Mitsubishis with Dodge and Plymouth badges for years. By the late 1980s the two companies were building cars together at a joint plant called Diamond-Star Motors in Normal, Illinois, which turned out the Mitsubishi Eclipse alongside its siblings, the Plymouth Laser and the Eagle Talon. (The Talon wore Chrysler's Eagle badge, not Dodge's, a detail that has started more forum arguments than it deserves.)

The badge-swapping ran in both directions and occasionally in circles. The Dodge Raider of 1987 to 1989 was a 2-door Mitsubishi Montero wearing a Dodge nose. Nearly 20 years later Mitsubishi sold a pickup called the Raider that was, underneath, a Dodge Dakota. The name left for America as a Mitsubishi in Dodge clothing and came back as a Dodge in Mitsubishi clothing, which is either poetry or a filing error.

The 3000GT and the Dodge Stealth came from the same idea. Both were built on the same line in Nagoya, both used the same drivetrains, and both went on sale in America for the 1991 model year. Chrysler styled the Stealth itself, with a different nose and cross-hair grille, different pillars and quarter windows and its own crescent-shaped spoiler, and left out the active aerodynamics entirely. In Japan the car was the GTO, a name borrowed from Mitsubishi's own Galant GTO coupe of the early 1970s, which had borrowed it from Ferrari's 250 GTO. Everywhere else it became the 3000GT, because Mitsubishi suspected that admirers of the Ferrari, and of the Pontiac, might not welcome a third GTO arriving from Nagoya.

The Stealth lasted one generation and 6 model years, bowing out after 1996. The Mitsubishi carried on through 1999 in America and into 2000 in Japan. It, too, was one generation, but refreshed twice, and owners divide it into Series 1 (1991 to 1993, pop-up headlights), Series 2 (1994 to 1996, fixed projector lamps, 320 hp and six speeds) and Series 3 (1997 on, capped by the 1999 facelift with its sharper nose and the rear wing owners call the Combat Wing).

There was very nearly a starring role, too. A Dodge Stealth was lined up to pace the 1991 Indianapolis 500 until the United Auto Workers objected to a Japanese-built car leading America's race, and Chrysler swapped in a prototype of a car it had not yet started building: the Viper. The Stealth stayed on as a backup pace car, the winner, Rick Mears, received one as part of his prize, and Dodge dealers sold pace-car replica Stealths regardless, since nobody could buy a Viper until later that year. It remains the only time this family was fired from a job for being too Japanese.

The Samurai's Hammer

Here is the thing nobody argued about, then or now: the shape. The best thing about the 3000GT was its design. It was cool, enigmatic and, 35 years on, timeless. The sculpted front, the aggressive tail, the shoulders over the rear wheels, the way it looked standing still and the way it looked going fast: it had presence. It was almost like the great war hammer of a samurai. Power, stance, dignity, the sort of object you showed respect whenever you met it.

Mitsubishi wrapped a coke-bottle waist around a long, low body 181 inches (4,600 mm) long and 72 inches (1,840 mm) wide, and managed a drag coefficient of 0.33 on the early cars. The cabin sits well back and the glass wraps around the tail, which gives the car an almost mid-engined posture even though its V6 sits crosswise under the hood. The strakes on its flanks gave it a Testarossa glint. On the Series 1 cars, the hood wore 2 small blisters that existed purely to clear the adjustable-damper actuators on top of the front struts, a styling detail shaped by technology. And the pop-up headlights did what pop-up headlights do, which is make grown adults wink back.

The 1994 refresh swapped the pop-ups for fixed projector lamps and smoothed the hood, and the car traded a little of its 1980s mischief for a certain severity. The 1999 facelift went further, with a sharper nose and a proper inverted-airfoil wing on the VR-4. Park any of them today and they still look as though they are doing 90 mph in a parking space.

And yet it was misunderstood. Too heavy for the purists, too flashy for the badge snobs, too complicated for the mechanics and, by the end, too expensive for nearly everyone. Looking back in 2024, Motor Trend credited the VR-4 with "ageless good looks that weren't truly appreciated during its day." That is the story of this car in one sentence, and it is why so many people who grew up with a poster of one are only now getting around to buying the real thing.

A Cockpit, Not a Cabin

Open the long door and drop in. The VR-4's seats are leather, and the driver's is adjustable in ways that felt like science fiction in 1991. Road & Track's rundown of the standard equipment included adjustable seat width as well as lumbar support, which means yes, the side bolsters really do move in and out to hold you. It is exactly as good as it sounds.

The dashboard wraps around the driver like a fighter cockpit, and the center stack leans your way. Set into it is a row of 3 small round gauges, oil pressure and turbo boost among them, each telling you something about the engine that most cars of the day preferred you not to know. Ahead are a big tachometer and speedometer. Within reach are the switches that made the VR-4 the VR-4: one to move the dampers between Tour and Sport and, on the early cars, another to move the exhaust between Tour and Sport. There are buttons for things, and buttons for the things those buttons control. It is very 1991, in the best possible way.

Motor Sport, trying the car in 1990 ahead of its European arrival, found the cockpit a little claustrophobic, and it is snug: the belt line is high and a lot of curved glass sweeps away from you. Then there are the rear seats. They exist. You may put people in them, provided those people are small, flexible and not holding a grudge. The Truth About Cars once summarized the Spyder's interior color choices as "grey and also-gray," which is unfair to the ivory and tan hides some Spyders wore but fair to plenty of coupes. On a long trip the back seat is better used for luggage, and with its backrests folded the hatch swallows a surprising amount of it.

Everything Mitsubishi Knew, in One Car

To understand the 3000GT, you have to understand where Mitsubishi was when it built it. In 1987 its Galant VR-4 had arrived in Japan with a package called Dynamic Four: full-time all-wheel drive through a viscous-coupled center differential, four-wheel steering, four-wheel independent suspension and 4-wheel anti-lock brakes, which Mitsubishi presented as the first time all 4 had been combined in one car. The same Galant offered an actively controlled suspension and was named Japan's Car of the Year. In 1990 the Diamante sedan arrived with a traction-and-trace control system that managed engine output and braking to hold a line through a corner, and it won Car of the Year, too. The GTO was built on the Diamante's platform, and it got everything.

When Mitsubishi explained the car to Motor Sport in 1990, it said the 3000GT had been designed "to be driven by as many people as possible, unlike Porsches and Ferraris." That is not a sports car philosophy. It is a grand touring philosophy, and it explains almost everything that follows.

Two turbos, one very stubborn V6

The engine is Mitsubishi's 6G72, a 3.0-liter, 24-valve, twin-cam V6 from the same family that powered Chrysler sedans and minivans, which tells you how tough the bottom end is. In the VR-4 it sits crosswise and breathes through a pair of small turbochargers, one per cylinder bank, each with its own intercooler. Small turbos respond quickly, and peak torque arrives at just 2,500 rpm. American ratings were 300 hp and 307 lb-ft from 1991 through 1993, then 320 hp and 315 lb-ft from 1994, when a 6-speed Getrag manual replaced the 5-speed. The Japanese GTO was officially rated at 280 PS throughout, thanks to the domestic gentleman's agreement that capped advertised output; its 1994 update raised torque instead. As one modern reviewer at Machines With Souls pointed out, that is more torque than the V8 in an E92 BMW M3 made. True, and delightful.

All four wheels, all the time

The all-wheel drive is full-time and comes without a single switch or warning light to remind you it is there. A planetary center differential with a viscous coupling splits torque 45 percent front and 55 percent rear in normal driving, a deliberate rear bias, and a viscous limited-slip differential sits in the back axle. When one end starts to slip, the viscous units shuffle torque toward the end with grip. The result is not a car that slides on demand like a rear-drive Supra. It is a car that simply goes: in the rain, on a cold morning, out of a tight corner, without drama.

The rear wheels steer, politely

The four-wheel steering is a hydraulic, same-phase system. Above about 31 mph (50 km/h) it turns the rear wheels up to roughly 1.5 degrees in the same direction as the fronts, depending on speed and steering input. It will not help you park, because there is no opposite-phase mode for tight turns, and you will never feel it working. What you feel is the result: a lane change at speed that happens in one clean motion, with the tail following the nose instead of swinging after it. This is stability engineering rather than agility engineering, and it is the reason a heavy car felt so planted at speeds best discussed with a lawyer present.

A wing that knows how fast you are going

This is the party trick. Above about 50 mph, the VR-4's Active Aero system lowers a front under-panel by 80 mm (3.1 in) and tilts the rear spoiler's angle of attack up by 14 degrees; below about 30 mph, both stow again. A console switch marked AUTO and OFF lets the driver leave it to the computer or keep the whole system tucked away. Mitsubishi claimed the system cut the lift coefficient from +0.10 to −0.07 without adding drag, and billed it as the world's first mass-production system to control front and rear lift at the same time.

That last part matters, because the 3000GT was not the first road car with a moving wing. Porsche's 964-generation 911, unveiled in Paris in 1988 and on sale as the Carrera 4 from 1989, already had a rear spoiler that rose automatically at 50 mph. What Mitsubishi did first was work both ends of the car at once. And it was not just marketing. When Russia's AutoReview magazine put a Series 2 GTO in a wind tunnel, deploying the aero took the car from real lift at both axles to something very close to neutral, and it barely moved the drag.

It is worth correcting a myth that grew up around cars like this: that adaptive dampers and active aero are now the preserve of $150,000 exotics. Today adaptive dampers turn up on hot hatchbacks and pickup trucks, and moving aero appears on everything from Corvettes to crossovers. The remarkable thing is the other half of the story. In 1991 you could not buy this combination anywhere at any price, and the idea of computers adjusting wings and damping in real time belonged to Formula 1, where active suspension was still being perfected. The 3000GT had all of it, first, for roughly Corvette money.

Two moods for the dampers, two voices for the exhaust

The Electronically Controlled Suspension offered Tour and Sport damping, and the Active Exhaust System let the driver choose between a quieter Tour note and a louder Sport note. According to Motor Sport, the valve did its work only below 3,500 rpm; above that, everybody got the loud one. Of all the things a car could do in 1991, letting you choose its voice might be the most endearing.

How Fast, Really

Numbers from different magazines, years and test tracks do not mix well, so the fairest picture comes from a single test. In its May 1997 issue, Motor Trend put a 3000GT VR-4 up against a Dodge Viper GTS, a Ferrari F355, a Porsche 911 Turbo, an Acura NSX-T, a Toyota Supra Turbo and a new C5 Chevrolet Corvette, and measured everything on the same surfaces with the same drivers.

Read the charts in order and a personality emerges. To 60 mph the Mitsubishi tied the NSX-T, the Corvette and the Ferrari at 4.8 seconds and beat the Supra by 0.3 second; only the Porsche and the Viper were quicker. Through the quarter mile it matched the Supra's 13.6 seconds exactly, but the trap speeds, 100.5 mph against the Toyota's 106.0, tell you the rest. The Mitsubishi won the launch on all-wheel-drive traction, and then the lighter Supra reeled it in. On the skidpad it pulled 0.95 g, fourth overall and ahead of the NSX-T, the Supra and the Corvette, and Motor Trend said it went round "like it was tethered," with its front tires setting the limit. In the slalom, where you have to lift and turn in a hurry, a sudden lift let the tail step out and it managed 67.5 mph, sixth of 7. On the road course it was last, at 42.3 seconds to the Viper's 39.4.

That is the 3000GT VR-4 in one table: devastating off the line, glued down in a long corner, uneasy when asked to change direction quickly, and too heavy to win a lap against cars built for laps. It was never a track king. It was never meant to be.

It could still embarrass the right people. In an early AutoWeek comparison, a 1991 VR-4 costing $34,423 (about $84,000 in 2026 money) reached 60 mph in 5.1 seconds, 0.2 second ahead of an Acura NSX that cost $61,000 (about $150,000 today). And in Japan, the video magazine Best Motoring, whose presenters were working racing drivers, pitted the lightened GTO MR against a lighter R32 Skyline GT-R and, as the story is told, watched the Mitsubishi pull ahead over a mile. The MR was the enthusiast's special: no four-wheel steering, no ABS, no adjustable dampers and no active aero, which brought it down to 1,650 kg (3,638 lb).

Driving It: A Grand Tourer in a Sports Car's Suit

The handling was remarkable given that the car was, frankly, heavy. That is where the suspension, the all-wheel drive and the four-wheel steering earned their keep. The car does feel large, because it is large. This is not the RX-7's scalpel. It is a true grand tourer, the kind that could carry you from New York to Miami in comfort, air conditioning on, your back settled into supple leather and all-wheel drive underneath you, at a pace we will describe only as brisk.

Turn the key and the V6 settles into a busy, slightly gruff idle; it is not as silky as the Supra's inline six, and it does not pretend to be. The clutch is weighty without being cruel. Then you ask for everything. Doug Kott, previewing the car for Road & Track at Mitsubishi's proving ground, described a brief scuff of tires followed by what he called

"Katie-bar-the-door acceleration that hurls you into the next week."Doug Kott, Road & Track, on the 3000GT VR-4

That is the defining sensation. There is no wheelspin to manage and no tail to catch; the car simply squats and leaves, the twin turbos hissing as they spool. One modern driver compared the turbo noise to a certain Sith Lord's breathing, and once you have heard it you cannot unhear it. Keep it on boost and the midrange shove is thick and generous. Short-shift lazily and it will drop off boost for a beat before catching again, which is the only reminder that these are turbos from 1991 rather than 2021.

In corners, the grip is enormous and the behavior is honest. Germany's sport auto found the traction perfect and the car's limit behavior, with its pronounced tendency to understeer, to be "anything but critical." Car and Driver, testing the Dodge Stealth R/T Turbo on Chrysler's track, wrote that it "simply exploded from corner to corner." Jeremy Clarkson, on the original Top Gear in 1992, pronounced both the 3000GT and the RX-7 great fun, and Clarkson was not in the habit of handing that out.

The complaint, when it came, was about connection rather than capability. Autocar's 1992 road test called it "a rather detached driving experience" and gave it 3 stars out of 5, and Hagerty has noted that period reviewers found it bulky and less refined than the 300ZX. They were not wrong. The steering is accurate but does not chatter at you, and you are always aware of the mass you are placing. The same qualities that make the car feel aloof on a narrow back road make it feel magnificent on a long, fast one. Auto Motor und Sport, looking back, summed it up as good-natured handling, real comfort and full equipment, the recipe for a competent long-distance sports car. That is exactly what Mitsubishi set out to build.

Living with one takes a little more commitment than living with a Supra. The timing belt wants changing every 60,000 miles or sooner. The four-wheel steering, dampers and aero are all worth checking, because on many cars at least one has quietly stopped working. Top Gear, in an affectionate 2023 reappraisal, warned of electrical gremlins that move in and stop paying rent. None of that is unusual for a 30-year-old car with this much to it. The reward is a car that is still quick, still comfortable, still turns every head in a parking lot, and still makes the rest of 1990s car design look slightly underdressed.

The Roof That Folded Itself Away

In more than a century of car design, few body styles have been as rare, or as coveted, as the true retractable hardtop: a solid roof that folds away on its own. It is fiendishly difficult to engineer, which is why, after a handful of prewar experiments, only Ford's Skyliner of 1957 to 1959 ever sold in meaningful numbers. Then nothing for 36 years. When the 3000GT Spyder arrived for 1995, it was the first fully automatic retractable hardtop sold in America since the Skyliner. As MotorWeek pointed out when it tested one, it managed the trick with less hardware than Mercedes-Benz needed to fold the fabric roof of its SL.

A roof Nissan turned down

The roof had a history before it had a car. ASC, the American Sunroof Corporation, founded by Heinz Prechter in a two-car garage in 1965 and by the 1990s the go-to convertible engineer for half the industry, built a working retractable-hardtop 300ZX and showed it at the 1991 Geneva motor show. Nissan passed. Mitsubishi did not. The idea became the 3000GT Spyder, shown at the 1993 Tokyo Motor Show, announced for America at the 1994 Los Angeles show as the industry's only one-touch retractable hardtop, and on sale in the spring of 1995.

12.5 hours in Rancho Dominguez

Every Spyder began in Nagoya as a special-order coupe built without its hatch, rear quarter glass or much of its trim, and with strengthened A-pillars and its own springs and dampers. It crossed the Pacific, rode in closed trucks to ASC's plant in Rancho Dominguez, on the edge of Long Beach, and entered what the owners' registry describes as a 25-stage process.

First came the surgery. The rocker panels were cut open with a plasma cutter and box-section rails weighing 25 kg (55 lb) apiece were welded in beneath the doors. With the interior stripped, the plasma cutter came out again and the original roof came off; MotorWeek's reporter admitted to wincing. Shear plates went inside the front and rear fenders, the cowl and windshield header were reinforced, and a massive bulkhead, an inverted U in section, was welded between the rear inner fenders to tie into the rocker reinforcements and carry the weight of the roof. In all, 40 new sheet-metal stampings were added, each one cut, notched and fitted by hand in jigs.

After a coat of sound-deadening, anti-chip paint on the floor and cargo area, the new systems went in: a fresh wiring harness from the firewall back, a dedicated control computer, electric motors, hydraulic pumps, lines and cylinders. The roof and its tonneau cover are made of lightweight sheet-molded compound, a fiber-reinforced composite rather than steel, built off site. The 2-piece roof weighs 44 kg (98 lb) and is lifted by 2 large hydraulic cylinders just ahead of the rear wheels, helped by a pair of coil springs, while 2 smaller vertical cylinders raise the tonneau. One motor in the windshield header drives the latches into stainless-steel striker plates; another, hidden in the rear headliner, raises and lowers the rear quarter windows by cable.

Then came the checks: the computer was calibrated through a connector in the driver's footwell, the car sat through a water test equal to 19 inches (48 cm) of rain in 4 minutes, went through an alignment and took a 7-mile road test around the plant. About 12.5 hours of work and roughly 1,600 new parts after arriving, each Spyder left for its dealer on a covered transporter. By late 1995, ASC was converting about 12 a day.

The 34-second ballet

From the driver's seat, it is one switch on the console. The side windows drop, the rear deck lid rises, the latches release the roof from the header, the rear quarter windows retract into the roof, the roof folds along a single seam and lowers into the trunk, and the lid closes over it. MotorWeek timed the whole thing at about 35 seconds. A 1995 newspaper review, archived by Cars.com, clocked 34 and added that the engine had better be running unless you enjoyed calling the auto club for a jump. It is nearly silent, and it stops traffic every single time. That same reviewer produced the best one-line verdict the car ever received: "How can you not love a car that tips its own top?"

What 175 kilograms did

All that steel, hydraulic plumbing and composite added about 175 kg (386 lb): Mitsubishi quoted 1,870 kg (4,123 lb) for the VR-4 Spyder against 1,695 kg (3,737 lb) for the coupe. To carry it, the Spyder got its own spring rates and kept 17-inch wheels with taller 245/45 tires when the coupe moved to 18s, and even its front fenders were unique. MotorWeek's test car still reached 60 mph in 5.4 seconds, only 0.6 second slower than the VR-4 coupe the show had tested 18 months earlier, ran the quarter mile in 14.0 seconds at 99 mph and stopped from 60 mph in 113 feet. Its drivers rated it one of the stiffest convertibles they had ever driven. ASC had done its job.

The price of a Porsche

Now the uncomfortable part. In 1995 the Spyder SL cost $57,449 (about $126,000 in 2026 money) and came only with the non-turbo engine and an automatic. The Spyder VR-4 cost $64,449 (about $141,000) and came only with the twin-turbo engine and the 6-speed manual; MotorWeek's well-equipped test car stickered at $68,766 (about $151,000). A Porsche 911 Carrera coupe that year started at $59,900 (about $131,000). The Mitsubishi convertible cost more than the air-cooled Porsche coupe and just $3,751 less than the 911 Cabriolet. It was a technological marvel priced like a status symbol, launched into a market that had just discovered the sport utility vehicle.

Why It Could Only Have Been This One

Here is a question worth asking: of all the great Japanese sports cars of the 1990s, why was this the one that got the folding hardtop, and why did it suit it so well?

Go down the list. The NSX was mid-engined, with its V6 sitting exactly where a folding roof would need to go; Honda's answer, in 1995, was the NSX-T and its removable targa panel, which is lovely and not remotely the same thing. The Supra offered a removable targa roof, too. The RX-7 never got an open version in its third generation at all. Mazda had sold a soft-top convertible of the previous one, but bolting 175 kg of roof machinery onto a car whose entire reason for existing was lightness would have been like fitting a hot tub to a racing canoe. Nissan came closest, in the most painful way possible. Its 300ZX convertible, also built by ASC, got a cloth roof, a fixed hoop standing up behind the seats and only the non-turbo engine. It looked a little odd with that bar in the airflow, and you could not have it with the twin turbos. Nissan had seen ASC's hardtop 300ZX at Geneva and said no.

The 3000GT was different in every way that mattered. Its engine was up front, which left a long rear deck for a roof to disappear into. It was already a 2+2 grand tourer rather than a 2-seat scalpel, so 175 kg more did not betray its character; it simply made a heavy, comfortable, fast car a little more of all three. It was already Mitsubishi's technology flagship, the car that wore every system the company had, so a roof that folded itself was not a gimmick bolted on; it was the natural last line on the equipment list. And it was already the most expensive, most image-conscious car in the showroom. The roof completed it. It took the 3000GT from high-tech coupe to something closer to an event, a car that drew a crowd, which, as ASC's own focus groups had found, was exactly what buyers wanted from it.

That is the case for the Spyder as the one car in its class that could carry a folding hardtop, and it holds up. It lifted the 3000GT into genuinely elite company. What it could not do was sell.

The Showroom Did Not Get the Memo

At the 1994 auto shows, the Spyder was a sensation. Mitsubishi reported 500 dealer orders 5 months before launch, then said it had pre-sold its first run of 1,800 cars to dealers. MotorWeek told viewers that production was spoken for through 1996. Reality arrived quickly. Dealers sold 232 Spyders in calendar 1995. That November, a New York dealer wrote to Automotive News that dealers who refused their allocation were being charged $2,500 per car (about $5,500 today) for the privilege: "they're making us pay them not to ship them." By early 1996 Mitsubishi was covering dealers' floorplan costs on unsold Spyders, and by that November it was offering dealers $10,000 (about $21,000 today) on each leftover 1995 car. A dealer in Van Nuys, meanwhile, had sold 10 of them and explained that his customers were image-conscious. Of course they were. It was Los Angeles.

The Spyder was quietly dropped from the lineup in August 1997. According to VIN data compiled by owners from Mitsubishi's own parts database, 1,618 were built, 741 SLs and 877 VR-4s, although lower totals circulate and the owners' registry is still counting. Either way, it is one of the rarest Japanese performance cars ever sold in America.

Mitsubishi at the Top of Its Game

It is worth remembering how good Mitsubishi was at this moment. The 3000GT did not come from nowhere; it came from a company on a roll.

The Galant VR-4 had brought all-wheel drive, four-wheel steering and active suspension to a family sedan and then gone rallying with the same hardware. The Diamante had won Japan's Car of the Year with traction control clever enough to steer by braking. The Lancer Evolution, launched in 1992, turned a compact sedan into a world-beater: Tommi Mäkinen won 4 consecutive World Rally Championship drivers' titles for Mitsubishi from 1996 to 1999, and the team took the manufacturers' title in 1998. The Pajero, the Montero in America, was busy becoming the most successful vehicle in the history of the Dakar Rally, with 12 outright wins, including 7 in a row from 2001 to 2007, a manufacturer record Guinness still lists. Mitsubishi was making cars people loved, cherished, were excited to buy and could not stop talking about. It was very possibly the height of the company.

Then it turned a page it would rather not have turned. In 2000, Mitsubishi admitted that for more than 20 years it had systematically hidden customer complaints that should have triggered recalls, covering brakes, clutches, fuel leaks and fuel tanks, dating back to 1977. More concealed defects surfaced in 2004. The alliance with DaimlerChrysler that had begun in 2000 came apart within 5 years. In 2016 the company admitted falsifying fuel-economy test data on hundreds of thousands of minicars, and within weeks Nissan bought a 34 percent stake for ¥237 billion ($2.2 billion then, about $3.1 billion in 2026 money), becoming its largest shareholder. The Lancer Evolution ended that same year, and the Eclipse name came back on a crossover. The company that once put four-wheel steering in a family sedan changed direction, and its vision became something else.

The Downfall, and Who Left First

Was the 3000GT's Achilles' heel, beyond the marketing, simply its price? Half right. The Spyder certainly priced itself out. But look at the 1995 window stickers again and the VR-4 coupe, at $43,898 (about $96,000 today), sat between the $42,579 300ZX Twin Turbo (about $93,000) and the $48,700 Supra Turbo (about $107,000), and far below the $81,000 NSX-T (about $177,000). It was not the priciest of the Japanese twin-turbos. It was the priciest idea. What actually finished it was what finished all of them.

The yen strengthened sharply through the early 1990s, and every Japanese sports car's American sticker climbed with it. Insurance on 300 hp coupes turned punitive. Buyers discovered sport utility vehicles. Sales collapsed across the class, and one by one the cars went home. Mitsubishi fought the price creep by removing the very gadgets that defined the car: the adjustable exhaust after 1994, the adjustable dampers after 1995 and the active aero after 1996. It added a cheaper single-cam base model for 1997. Just 287 VR-4s were built for North America in the final 1999 model year. Japanese production ended in 2000, with new side-impact rules on the horizon.

Look at that chart again and notice something. The RX-7 left after 1995, the 300ZX after 1996, the Supra after 1998. The 3000GT, the heaviest, most complicated and supposedly least wanted of them, was the last of the original twin-turbo Japanese GTs still on sale in America. Of the whole group, only the naturally aspirated NSX outlasted it. For a car everyone said was too much, it had remarkable staying power.

Thunderbolt

It was never a track king. In fact, the most famous race a GTO ever won took place in a Jackie Chan movie, which is fitting, because for about 20 years Jackie Chan and Mitsubishi were about as inseparable as Jackie Chan and ladders.

When his first Hollywood outing, The Cannonball Run in 1981, put him in a rocket-assisted Subaru, Mitsubishi made sure the 1984 sequel put him in a Starion instead, with his character written as a Mitsubishi engineer. From then on, the three diamonds turned up in nearly all of his Hong Kong films: a one-off Colt convertible in Armour of God, Pajeros everywhere, and the white Lancer Evolution IV that reverses into a parking space in Who Am I? Mitsubishi backed a Jackie Chan Cup celebrity race from 1984 to 2003 and, in 2005, built 50 Lancer Evolution IX Jackie Chan editions.

Then there is Thunderbolt (1995), which some fans have called "a 110-minute Mitsubishi commercial" and which is a genuinely great racing movie with kung fu, if you are into that. Jackie plays a mechanic and part-time racer who helps the Hong Kong police catch street racers. The villain, a psychopathic international racer called Cougar, drives a black Skyline GT-R, and for the record it is an R32, not the R33 that memory tends to supply. Jackie chases him through Hong Kong in a commandeered Mitsubishi FTO, has his sisters kidnapped, builds a yellow Lancer Evolution III race car and watches it get wrecked at Sendai Hi-Land Raceway. A Mitsubishi executive's daughter hands him 2 brand-new white GTO race cars and a supply of Advan tires. He starts from the back, fights through the field, uses a spun Honda NSX as a ramp, slides into the gravel nose to nose with the Skyline on the last lap, floors it in reverse and wins by a nose in a photo finish. The GTO beat Godzilla.

The production was reportedly the most expensive Hong Kong film made to that point, at about HK$30 million (US$3.9 million then, about $8.5 million today). Bad weather in Japan pushed part of the race filming to Malaysia's Batu Tiga circuit, and much of the racing footage runs at double speed. Only in the movies. But they are very good movies.

Pixels: The GTO's Second Career

For a whole generation of enthusiasts, the first 3000GT they ever drove was on a PlayStation. The original Gran Turismo in 1997 offered the GTO Twin Turbo and described it, rather perfectly, as the model "utilizing all the technology Mitsubishi has to offer." It also offered something better: the GTO LM Edition, a fictional racing version with more than 600 hp and downforce to rival the GT1 cars of the day. In the first game it was one of only 3 cars with a 7-speed gearbox, and it sat among the 6 halo LM cars priced at 500,000 credits, alongside LM versions of the NSX, RX-7, Skyline, Impreza and Supra. It appeared only in the first 2 games and was never built. Naturally, someone is now building it: Norwegian drifter Roger Haalands is turning a real 3000GT into an LM Edition because, as he told The Drive, "it's a life goal."

The road car stuck around. The 1996 GTO Twin Turbo appeared in every mainline Gran Turismo through GT6 except GT3, which carried the 1999 facelift instead. Forza Motorsport has included the GTO in every title since the second one, it arrived in Forza Horizon 4 and 5, and the Dodge Stealth R/T Turbo has turned up from the first Forza Motorsport to the 2023 reboot. Need for Speed: Underground 2 put a 3000GT VR-4 in the thick of the neon tuner boom in 2004, and the GTO is back on the night expressway in 2025's Tokyo Xtreme Racer.

Was it dominant? Honestly, the road car was a heavy, fast, grippy thing that the games modeled faithfully, which meant it launched hard and pushed wide. The LM Edition was the dominant one. It just never existed.

The Tuners

Were they loved by tuners? Yes, by a particular kind of tuner. The 6G72 is an oversquare engine, 91.1 mm of bore to 76 mm of stroke, that likes to rev, and from 1993 the twin-turbo version gained a 4-bolt main-bearing block and, in most cars, a forged crankshaft. Owners' clubs such as 3000GT/Stealth International and its wiki have documented big-power builds for a quarter of a century. TractionLife featured a 1999 VR-4 making 510 hp at the wheels on 21 psi of boost whose owner said it would still cover 700 km (434 miles) on a tank with the air conditioning running. Sport Compact Car put a 3000GT Spyder into its 2003 Ultimate Street Car Challenge. And the Gran Turismo-inspired LM Edition build in Norway began with an angle grinder and a Series 2 car.

The honest caveat is that the 3000GT was never the default tuner platform. A complex all-wheel-drive drivetrain and a crosswise engine make big power more expensive to hold on to than it is in a rear-drive Supra, and plenty of builders chose the Toyota's 2JZ for exactly that reason. The people who build 3000GTs build them because they love 3000GTs, which is the best reason there is.

What They Are Worth Now

This is where the misunderstanding becomes an opportunity. Hagerty's Price Guide put a good-condition 1995 VR-4 coupe at $29,800 in early 2025 (about $31,000 in 2026 money), and the best auction result for a 1995 VR-4 over the previous 3 years was $41,094. A good 1995 Spyder was valued at $27,500 (about $29,000 today), less than the coupe, for one of the rarest open Japanese performance cars ever sold here. A comparable Supra Turbo was around $75,000. Top Gear put it best in 2023: a month's rent on a small room in London costs more than the going rate for most 3000GTs.

There are exceptions, and they are spectacular. In February 2022 a 1999 VR-4 with 168 miles on the odometer, bought wholesale from an Indiana dealer and stored untouched for nearly 20 years, sold for $100,499 on The Market by Bonhams (about $115,000 in 2026 money). Hagerty asked whether it signaled big things for the car. Perhaps. What it certainly signaled is that the right 3000GT, in the right condition, is finally being valued like the landmark it is.

If you are shopping, buy the history as much as the car. Look for records of timing-belt changes, check that the four-wheel steering, dampers and aero actually work, and on a Spyder, have the roof cycled several times and inspected. One low-mileage Spyder that went to auction recently needed more than $7,000 of work, including new roof hydraulics and a rebuilt control module. The owners' registry sells Spyder parts that Mitsubishi no longer does. Budget for all of it, and you will own something almost nobody else at the car show has.

A Piece of the Golden Age

The 3000GT was never the lightest of the great Japanese GTs, never the fastest around a track and never the one the purists put on their lists. It was the overachiever of its class, the one that tried to do everything at once, and very nearly did. It launched like a missile, cornered like it was on rails, cruised like a luxury car and, in its most outrageous form, took its own roof off at the touch of a button. Its real Achilles' heel was never a lack of brilliance. It was that brilliance costs money, and by the mid-1990s America had stopped paying for this kind of brilliance at all.

Those who own one now hold a piece of a legendary era: the moment when a Japanese company with more ambition than restraint built a car that had everything, and a generation of kids pinned it to their bedroom walls. It had power, stance and dignity. You showed it respect whenever you greeted it.

You still should.