Comparisons · Mitsubishi Pajero / Montero  vs  Isuzu Trooper

Three Dials and a Swing Gate

Two square, honest, unkillable Japanese 4x4s that solved the same problem in different ways, outlasted almost everything that laughed at them, and then quietly disappeared. One of them is coming back this autumn. The other should have.

By Camille Bouchard

Picture the staging area at the edge of somewhere. A gravel apron before a desert track, or a campground at the end of a fire road, or the dusty lot where a safari outfit lines up its vehicles at dawn. Everyone is sizing everyone else up, the way people always do when the pavement ends.

The Land Rover crowd is talking about heritage. The Jeep people are talking about articulation, and about the badge, and about how many inches of lift they're running. Somebody says the word "Rubicon" more than once. There is a great deal of confidence in the air, and a certain amount of it is even earned.

And parked off to one side there are two boxes. One wears a diamond badge and rides on wheels that look a size too small for the arches. The other is so plainly drawn it barely registers as a design at all. Their owners are leaning on the fenders, drinking something out of a thermos, listening to all of it.

They catch each other's eye. Neither of them says anything.

They don't need to. They both already know how the day ends: somebody is going to be in a ditch by mid-afternoon, and it isn't going to be either of them, and they are going to be the ones who get the strap out. They will do it without a word of gloating. They'll say something encouraging about the line the guy tried to take. They'll mean it.

Two answers to the same question

Between roughly 1981 and 2006, the Mitsubishi Pajero — sold as the Montero across the Americas and Spain, and as the Shogun in Britain — and the Isuzu Trooper occupied the same strange, wonderful, now-vanished patch of the market. Both were body-on-frame. Both had a low range and a proper transfer case. Both had genuinely useful interior packaging and a tailgate that opened sideways rather than up. Both were sold to people who intended to actually go somewhere, and both were built to a standard that meant those people mostly got back.

They approached it from different directions, though, and that difference is the whole reason this comparison is interesting rather than redundant.

The Pajero was the extrovert. Mitsubishi built its reputation in public, in the world's hardest race, and then sold you a slightly softened version of the thing that won it. Its engineering is showy in the best sense: the transfer case with four selectable positions, the three dials on the dashboard that tell you which way is up, the homologation special with fender flares wide enough to see from a helicopter.

The Trooper was the introvert. Isuzu is, at its heart, a truck and diesel company that occasionally made passenger vehicles, and the Trooper reads like it. Its cleverness is all structural — the packaging, the axles, the sheer amount of glass, the way its 4WD system was designed to require nothing of you at all. It didn't win races. It hauled UN aid workers and Kenyan schoolteachers and Colorado ski instructors, hundreds of thousands of miles at a time, and then it did it again.

One of them was designed to be admired. The other was designed to be forgotten about, in the way you forget about a good pair of boots. Both are compliments.

The Pajero: four generations and a desert

Mitsubishi showed a Pajero concept at Tokyo in 1973, another in 1978, and put the real thing on sale in May 1982. The concept was simple and, at the time, not obvious: take the genuine off-road capability of a working 4x4 and wrap it in something a family could live with. Mitsubishi's own framing for it was a recreational vehicle — the term "SUV" didn't exist yet in the form we use now.

It went to the Paris-Dakar the following year, in 1983, and won its class. That set the pattern for the next quarter century, and we'll come back to it briefly, because the racing is not actually the most interesting thing about this vehicle.

Second generation (1991–1999) — the one that mattered

This is the Pajero most people picture, and the one that turned a competent 4x4 into a phenomenon. Launched January 1991, wider and roomier, offered as a metal-top or canvas-top short wheelbase and a high-roof long wheelbase wagon with a third row. In Japan it became a genuine cultural object — the ski-boom years put them in every resort parking lot in the country.

Its headline was Super Select 4WD, and we'll take that apart properly further down. It also brought multi-mode ABS and electronically adjustable dampers, and an optional 3.5-liter 24-valve V6 that pushed it toward luxury territory. In the United States it arrived as the redesigned 1992 Montero with a 3.0-liter V6, a side-hinged rear door, and, on the sporting SR trim, fender flares and a 31-inch tire package.

Third generation (1999–2006)

The big structural rethink. Mitsubishi moved to a unibody integrated with a ladder-type subframe — lighter than a separate frame, stiffer, and, crucially, it allowed a longer suspension stroke. Independent rear suspension arrived, improving both articulation and ride. The fuel tank moved between the axles. Super Select became SS4-II, its center differential switching from bevel gears to a planetary set so torque could sit at a rear-biased 33:67 and shuffle toward 50:50 as conditions demanded, now fully electronic and no longer requiring the vehicle to be in gear to change modes.

This is also the last one Americans could buy. It was only ever sold here as the Montero, and the Montero left the US market after the 2006 model year.

Fourth generation (2006–2021) — the one Americans never met

Here the two stories separate for good. The Trooper had been dead for four years when this car appeared, and the Montero name was gone from North America — so for American readers the fourth-generation Pajero is a rumor. For everyone from Perth to Riyadh to Santiago, it's simply what a Pajero is. It ran for fifteen years, the longest production life in the model's history, and it deserves rather more than the footnote it usually gets.

It broke cover at the Paris Motor Show on 30 September 2006. Structurally it was an evolution rather than a reinvention — the third generation's monocoque with an integrated ladder frame, further stiffened, wearing Mitsubishi's RISE impact-absorbing structure. Independent suspension at all four corners. Development effort went where the market had moved: safety, refinement, and electronics.

The engines

Two mattered, and which one you got says everything about where you live.

The 4M41 3.2-liter DI-D common-rail diesel is the one the world actually wanted, and it's the best engine ever fitted to a production Pajero. It launched at 168 horsepower (170 PS) and 282 lb-ft, and in 2011 was reworked to 197 horsepower (200 PS) and 325 lb-ft at 2,000 rpm while meeting Euro V. That torque figure is the whole argument — more low-end pull, at lower revs, than several V8 rivals of the period, delivered exactly where a loaded vehicle towing a trailer up a sand track needs it. It's chain-driven, so there's no cambelt to budget for.

The 6G75 3.8-liter V6, the same family the last American Monteros used, carried on for markets where diesel was cheap or unloved — principally the Middle East, where it remains the default and where a Pajero is genuinely part of the landscape. Smoother, thirstier, simpler. Official consumption tells the story bluntly: about 26 miles per gallon for the diesel against roughly 17 for the V6.

Transmissions were a five-speed manual, a four-speed automatic, or the five-speed automatic that most sought-after cars carry.

What it does

Super Select II carried over, refined again, with the same four positions and the same rare ability to sit in full-time four-wheel drive on dry tarmac all day. Ground clearance runs 8.5 to 8.9 inches depending on year and market. Approach is about 36 degrees, departure about 31. Braked towing capacity reaches 6,834 pounds — among the highest in its class, and the number that made it the default tow vehicle for a generation of Australian families with a caravan and three weeks off.

Higher trims added a lockable rear differential to the lockable center diff, which is the combination that lets a Pajero go places its independent suspension suggests it shouldn't.

Safety improved sharply across the run: dual-stage front airbags, side and curtain airbags, ASTC, EBD, larger front rotors, ISOFIX from 2007. Pre-2007 cars rated four ANCAP stars; later ones took the full five.

Why the world kept buying it

Because it stopped changing, and that turned out to be the feature.

Fifteen years is an extraordinarily long time to sell one design, and the ordinary reading is neglect. The better reading is that Mitsubishi had finished. The car did what it was for, parts were everywhere, every competent mechanic between Alice Springs and Nairobi had already fixed one, and it would run on indifferent fuel in punishing heat without complaint. In markets where a breakdown is a logistical event rather than an inconvenience, a design nobody is fiddling with is worth more than a new one.

It also grew a second reputation as the rest of the industry moved on. As rivals filled up with software and sealed systems, the Pajero's comparative mechanical simplicity became the reason to buy one — the appeal now runs strongly among people who intend to be a long way from a dealer.

The sweet spot, by broad consensus among the people who use them: 2010–2015 long-wheelbase diesels with the five-speed automatic. Post-uprate torque, pre-DPF complication or early enough in it, and old enough to be sensibly priced.

And the honest downsides

The interior is the consistent complaint, and it's fair. It was merely acceptable in 2006 and it was left largely alone, so by the end the Pajero's cabin was a decade and a half behind anything it was parked next to. Spacious, sensibly laid out, full of storage — and plainly, visibly old. Later cars have no autonomous braking or the modern driver-assist suite, because those things didn't exist when the vehicle was engineered.

Mechanically the known issues are specific and worth memorizing before you buy. The 4M41's upper timing-chain guide wears and can break, letting the chain jump and destroying the engine; owners' clubs suggest replacing it preventively around every 56,000 miles, and any rattle from the front of the engine is a stop-driving-now event. Suction control valve, MAP sensor and EGR faults are common and generally cheap. Injectors gave trouble on 2016–2018 cars, sometimes needing full replacement around 75,000 to 95,000 miles. On the V6, the timing belt is a hard 56,000-mile item, valve stem seals leak past about 95,000 miles, and water pumps go around 75,000.

The DPF on later diesels is excellent on the open road and miserable in stop-start city use — a DPF car with a short-trip history is a genuine red flag. Automatic transmissions can suffer from sustained heavy towing. And some variants were caught in the Takata airbag recall.

Against that: complaints from owners are rare in any systemic sense, and the driveline — usually the fragile part of a complex modern four-wheel-drive — has no inbuilt weak point anyone has found in twenty years of hard use.

The end

The Pajero was discontinued in its home market in September 2019. Production continued for the markets where demand hadn't gone anywhere — Australia, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, South America — until it stopped completely in March 2021, with the last Final Edition cars delivered as 2022 models.

It didn't end because it had been beaten. It ended because the money went to crossovers, and Mitsubishi's resources followed the money. Across 39 years, more than 3.25 million Pajeros went to over 170 countries.

The Trooper: two generations and an empire of badges

The Trooper arrived in September 1981, which makes it older than the Pajero, older than the 4Runner, and older than the Pathfinder. It reached America for 1984 at an introductory price of $8,683, with a 1.9-liter four making 86 horsepower, a four-speed manual and part-time four-wheel drive. It was, at that point, an aggressively basic thing — a cheap alternative to a Jeep Cherokee, with independent front suspension from the very beginning, which was unusual and which mattered.

It got better in the way honest vehicles do: air conditioning, power windows, a 2.6-liter four, then a GM-sourced 2.8 V6.

Second generation (1991/92–2002) — the UBS

Redesigned in December 1991 for the 1992 model year, and this is the Trooper worth caring about. Bigger, more powerful, considerably more luxurious, and still emphatically a truck: a separate ladder frame under all of it. Suspension was independent double-wishbone with torsion bars in front, and a coil-sprung live rear axle on a multi-link — coils and links replacing the previous leaves, which transformed the ride. Four-wheel disc brakes. A rear limited-slip differential was optional across the range.

Engines were 3.2-liter V6s, a 175-horsepower SOHC and a 190-horsepower DOHC, and by 1998 the US cars got a DOHC 3.5 making 215. Elsewhere in the world you could have diesels: the 3.1-liter 4JG2, later the 3.0-liter 4JX1 at 157 horsepower.

Cargo space is the number that still stops people. 117.8 cubic feet in the S and LS. Cars that cost twice as much today don't offer that.

The badge empire

Here is the part that tells you how respected this vehicle actually was inside the industry, whatever the public thought. Isuzu sold the Trooper, and let other people sell it too, under an almost comic number of names: Bighorn in Japan, Honda Horizon in Japan, Acura SLX in America, Opel Monterey in Europe, Vauxhall Monterey in Britain, Holden Jackaroo and Holden Monterey in Australia, Subaru Bighorn, Chevrolet Trooper.

Read that list again. Honda — a company with famously little patience for other people's engineering — put its own badge on this thing and sold it in two markets. Subaru did the same. GM sold it on three continents. When a design gets rebadged by that many rivals, it is because none of them could build a better one for the money, and all of them knew it.

The Trooper left the US after 2002, replaced by the smaller Axiom and by the Ascender, which was a rebadged GMC Envoy. The last Bighorn was built in Japan in September 2002, as Isuzu got out of building its own passenger vehicles altogether.

The dials

Before we get to how they work, we should talk about how they feel from the driver's seat, because this is where both of these vehicles say something modern SUVs no longer bother to say.

Everything in them is a physical object placed somewhere for a reason. The transfer case lever in the Pajero falls exactly where your left hand drops when your right is on the wheel, because you will need it while moving, and you should not have to look. The Trooper's 4WD controls sit up on the dash, in the open, so a driver in gloves can find them by feel. The window switches are big. The vents are big. The grab handle above the passenger door is bolted through structure, not glued to a headliner, because someone is going to hang off it while you're on a side slope.

The tailgate swings out sideways rather than lifting up. On the Trooper it does it in two sections — a wide door taking roughly two-thirds of the opening on the left, a narrow one on the right, so most loading happens through one door and the full width is there when you need it. On the Montero it's a single side-hinged door with a tool kit built into it, the way BMW used to do. Either way it is a decision made by people who have tried to load a vehicle on a hill, or in a garage with low headroom, or in the rain.

And it was never merely a preference. When Car and Driver put seven sport-utes through an off-road comparison in 1996, they stopped to warn readers about exactly this: four of the seven had top-hinged gates that swung up minivan-style, and those can foul the tongue jack of a trailer. The Isuzu in that test had the widest rear opening of the group and its cargo bay was two inches wider than the next-widest thing there. A liftgate is easier to style. A swing gate is easier to use.

And then there is the Pajero's most beloved detail, the one that has outlived the vehicle itself: the three dials on top of the dashboard. An inclinometer showing pitch and roll, an altimeter, a compass. Not one of them is necessary. Every one of them tells you something you actually want to know when you are a long way from a road, and all three are placed high in your line of sight so you can read them without dropping your eyes.

It's worth being precise about this, because a fair amount of the coverage around the revival has blurred it. There were two pods, and they did different jobs. The first-generation car from 1982 carried an inclinometer flanked by a voltmeter and an oil-pressure gauge — a cluster aimed at the vehicle's own health on a long run a long way from a garage, and, as far as anyone can establish, the first multi-gauge auxiliary cluster fitted to anything in this class. The second-generation car swapped two of the three and pointed the whole thing outward: pitch and roll, altitude, compass heading, ambient temperature, and on some units barometric pressure. That is the pod people mean when they say the pod. The third generation kept it as a trim option; the fourth folded it into an LCD.

Not everyone was charmed. When Car and Driver tested the redesigned 1992 Montero, they filed the inclinometer under the vehicle's wacky bits — lumped in with the adjustable shocks and the spring-mounted driver's seat as things a person could comfortably live without. Their complaint was that it told you your angle of lean while you were parked, which is a fair joke and completely misses who the gauge is for.

Thirty-four years later, Mitsubishi has now confirmed that the triple meter is coming back on the new Pajero, reborn as a digital Multi Meter reading altitude, compass heading, outside temperature, pitch and roll angles, and left-to-right torque distribution. Of everything the company could have chosen to resurrect first, it chose the dials. They understand what people actually loved.

Two philosophies of traction

This is the technical heart of it, and it is genuinely a difference of belief, not just of hardware.

Super Select 4WD — trust the driver

Mitsubishi's argument was that a good driver should be handed the whole toolbox and be allowed to choose. Super Select, introduced on the 1991 Pajero, was among the first systems on any Japanese 4x4 to combine part-time two-wheel drive, full-time four-wheel drive through an open center differential, and a locked four-wheel drive low range in one selector. Four positions:

The genuinely clever part is 4H. Most part-time systems of the era gave you two-wheel drive or a locked four-wheel drive that would bind and hop and eventually destroy itself on dry pavement. Super Select's open center differential meant you could leave it in 4H permanently on the road and nothing would complain. And you could move between 2H and 4H on the fly, at up to 62 mph, which in 1991 was an industry first.

SS4-II refined it further with the planetary center differential and electronic actuation, and added terrain modes — gravel, mud and snow, sand, rock. In the current Pajero Sport and Triton the selector is a rotary dial, with the locked positions deliberately requiring a downward press so you cannot fall into them by accident.

Torque On Demand — trust the computer

Isuzu's answer, arriving with the 1998 facelift, was a BorgWarner system called Torque On Demand, and its argument was the opposite: the driver has enough to think about, so the vehicle should sort it out.

In its default state the Trooper is rear-wheel drive. Press the button and TOD wakes up: an electronically controlled multi-plate clutch inside the transfer case, fed by wheel-speed sensors around the vehicle, progressively sends torque forward the instant the rear axle starts to slip, and hands it back the instant it stops. There are no locking hubs to engage — the front half-shafts turn all the time — so engagement is effectively instantaneous. And there is a little display on the dash that shows you, in real time, where the torque is going.

Pull the lever into 4L and the whole thing locks solid at a mechanical 50:50 with low-range reduction, exactly like any conventional system.

It is a very good system and it has one real flaw, which Trooper owners have been complaining about for twenty-five years: there is no manual 4H lock. You get automatic in high range, or locked in low range, and nothing in between. On a fast sandy track where you want 50:50 at speed, that's a genuine limitation, and it's the one place where Super Select is straightforwardly, unarguably better.

Mitsubishi built a system for someone who wants to make the decision. Isuzu built one for someone who is busy driving.

Suspension, gearing, and how they actually go

Both used torsion bars up front, which is worth dwelling on, because it is the reason both of these still work so well as overland platforms. A torsion bar is a spring you can adjust with a wrench. Add a winch bumper, a drawer system and 200 pounds of water, and you can crank the front back up to ride height in an afternoon without buying anything. Live rear axles on coils give you the articulation and the strength, without the ride penalty of leaves.

Neither has a solid front axle, which the hardcore crowd will tell you is a disqualification. It isn't, and the off-road community worked that out a long time ago. Independent front suspension costs you some ultimate articulation and buys you steering precision, ride quality and 400-mile days that don't leave you concussed. For anyone actually covering distance to get somewhere remote — as opposed to crawling a mile of rocks and trailering home — that is the correct trade, and the Trooper in particular earned a reputation among serious off-roaders for its articulation, its approach and departure angles, its ground clearance and the sheer stoutness of its differentials and axles.

On the road

Tall, both of them. You feel the height in the first corner and you never fully stop feeling it. The steering is slow and low-geared, which is exactly what you want at 20 mph on a rutted track and exactly what you don't want on a mountain switchback. There is body roll. There is wind noise. Neither is fast: 0–60 in a 215-horsepower Montero SR was around 10 seconds, and fuel economy sat in the mid-to-high teens if you were gentle and lower if you weren't.

But the ride is better than you expect, especially the Trooper's, which reviewers in 1992 singled out as excellent once the coils replaced the leaves. Both are quiet cruisers at 65. Both have enormous glass and an upright seating position that makes them dramatically easier to place on the road than any modern SUV with a gun-slit rear window and a reversing camera to compensate.

Off it

This is where the years fall away. Low range in either one is a revelation if your recent experience is crossovers with a "mud" button. The gearing is short enough that you can idle up things that look impossible; the visibility means you can see where your front wheels are; the ground clearance is real; the underbody protection is real. The Pajero, with the center diff locked and the optional rear locker, has a slightly higher ceiling and a much more satisfying process. The Trooper's TOD sorts itself out so quietly that the first time you use it you'll wonder whether it did anything, right up until you notice you're still moving.

Living with one

Big, thirsty, and shaped like a filing cabinet, which means everything fits. Roof racks bolt to something structural. The rear seats fold flat into a bed. The swing gate lets you cook off the back of it in the rain. Parts, in 2026, are the thing to think about hardest: Pajero support is excellent globally because Mitsubishi built 3.25 million of them and still sells the Pajero Sport, while Trooper support in America is thinner and leans on a small number of specialist suppliers and a very committed forum community. Neither is a problem. Both are a phone call.

The reliability, honestly

Both have earned their reputations, and both have specific, well-documented weak points that anyone buying one should know about. A love letter that leaves out the flaws isn't a love letter, it's an advertisement.

The Trooper's big one: the 1998–2000 3.2 and 3.5 V6s were built without adequate oil-ring drain-back in the third piston-ring groove. Neglect the oil changes and the rings clog, consumption goes through the roof, and if the level ever drops far enough you take out a rod bearing and the short block with it. Cars maintained properly often never showed it at all; cars that weren't, ate themselves. Isuzu revised it around late 2000. Intake manifold gaskets are a common, cheap, non-fatal annoyance. Rear disc calipers stick. Manual gearboxes can wear first or third.

The diesel one: the 3.0-liter 4JX1, sold outside North America, has a well-known injector and cylinder-head reputation and is the one engine in this article to approach with genuine caution. The older 3.1 4JG2 is the safer diesel. The 1992–1997 3.2-liter V6s are, by consensus, the most trouble-free gasoline engines Isuzu put in this vehicle.

The Pajero's: the automatic transmissions want their fluid changed on schedule and get expensive when they don't. Third-generation cars have their share of electrical gremlins in the SS4-II actuators — the system is vacuum-and-solenoid operated and vacuum lines perish. Rust in the usual places, worse on European and Japanese-market cars than on Australian and Middle Eastern ones. Diesel injectors on the 3.2 DI-D are a known service item, not a surprise.

Against all of that, set what owners actually report. Kelley Blue Book's 1998 Trooper reviews run 4.7 out of 5 for reliability across 136 owners, with 93 percent recommending it and multiple examples past 300,000 miles. There is a Trooper owner in Britain who drove his family from London to Morocco and back every summer on the 4JX1 diesel. Another posting from California at 205,000 miles and thirty years old, reporting that his 3.2 used about ten ounces of oil in 1,500 miles.

The pattern is not "these never break." It's "these break in ways you can fix, and then they keep going."

2001: the ground moves

There is a photograph from a Car and Driver comparison test in 2001 that tells you the era is over, and you don't even have to read the story. Seven vehicles lined up: a BMW X5, an Acura MDX, a Mercedes ML320, a Lexus RX300, an Infiniti QX4 — and then, off at the end, two old dogs. A Land Rover Discovery Series II and a Mitsubishi Montero XLS.

Five crossovers and two trucks. That is the whole handover, in one frame. The sport-utility was on its way out and the thing that replaced it had already arrived, wearing a car's platform and a car's manners and no low range worth the name.

The Montero finished fourth, which given the company it was keeping is a genuinely solid result — and the way it got there is the most Montero thing imaginable.

On pavement it was beaten comprehensively. It weighed 4,813 pounds, posted the slowest 0–60 in the group at 11.8 seconds, tied the Land Rover for the laziest 30-to-50 pass, and turned in the lowest grip of the seven at 0.65 g. At speed it heeled over and took its time recovering from quick transitions. Testers wanted a V8 and said so.

And then they took it off the road, and it beat every single one of them.

Two-speed transfer case, locking center differential, limited-slip rear, 9.3 inches of ground clearance, a 42-degree approach angle and suspension travel the rest of the field could not approach. The magazine named it the off-road champion of the test outright — as capable in the rough as the Land Rover, and considerably kinder about it, riding over ruts at low speed with a suppleness that meant nobody in the vehicle ever needed to reach for one of its ten grab handles.

They also, plainly, enjoyed it. The nose like a bloodhound on a scent. A shifter shaped like the business end of a golf driver. Mirrors that looked requisitioned from a semi truck. A hazard button the size of a computer mouse. And the only automatic in the group that did what it was asked, every time, without argument.

Read those two columns against each other and you have the entire argument of this article in a single test result. On the metrics the market had started caring about — acceleration, skidpad, on-road composure — it lost. On the metrics it was actually built for, it beat a Land Rover.

Nine years earlier, the magazine had closed its winning writeup of the Trooper with a line about how the more they drove it, the more they liked it. In 2001, an editor used the identical sentence about the Montero.

The same compliment, twice, nine years apart, to each of these two in turn. It is the compliment you pay to something that doesn't perform for you — that just quietly turns out to be better than you assumed, every day, until you stop arguing.

The scar they share

Here is the strangest thing these two have in common, and it is the reason the Trooper's reputation never recovered.

In August 1996, Consumers Union announced that Consumer Reports had rated the 1995–96 Isuzu Trooper and its twin, the 1996 Acura SLX, Not Acceptable, after they tipped up onto two wheels during the magazine's emergency avoidance-maneuver test. CU asked the government to investigate and called for a recall of some 35,000 vehicles.

Isuzu sued for defamation, arguing the test had been rigged — different steering inputs, different paths through the course, outriggers fitted. In 2000 a federal jury cleared Consumers Union of liability but simultaneously found it had made false statements about Isuzu and had shown reckless disregard for the truth. No damages were awarded. Both sides declared victory. Nobody won. The Trooper's sales never came back.

Then, in June 2001, Consumer Reports did it again — to the Montero. The redesigned 2001 Montero Limited tipped up in eight of nine runs at 36 mph and, in CU's words, would likely have gone over without the outriggers. It was the magazine's first Not Acceptable rating since 1996. Mitsubishi said it had devoted thousands of hours to testing, hired an independent expert, found nothing, and would not recall.

Across thirteen years and 118 vehicles tested on that course, only four ever tipped badly enough to earn the rating: the Suzuki Samurai in 1988, the Trooper and SLX in 1996, and the Montero Limited in 2001.

Three of those four are the subjects of this article or its close relations. Make of that what you will — reasonable people still argue about whether the test was fair, whether tall body-on-frame 4x4s were being asked to behave like sedans, and whether a magazine should be running a maneuver it admits isn't designed to elicit a rollover. What is not arguable is the commercial effect. Both of these vehicles were, in the American market, mortally wounded by a magazine.

About that desert

Briefly, because the racing tends to swallow the rest of the story. Mitsubishi entered the Dakar 26 times with versions of the Pajero and won it 12 times overall, including an unbroken run of seven consecutive victories from 2001 through 2007. That is not a record anyone is going to approach. It earned the car the nickname King of the Desert, and it is the reason a Pajero badge still carries weight in North Africa, the Gulf, Australia and South America in a way it never quite did in North America.

The thing worth holding onto is that in T2 form the race car was very close to the road car. The Super Select architecture that won across the Sahara is the same architecture in the used Pajero on a South African forecourt. That is a rarer claim than it sounds.

The Trooper deserves better

Let's put this plainly, because it's the argument this piece exists to make.

The Isuzu Trooper is the most underrated serious off-road vehicle Japan ever exported, and the reason is almost entirely reputational rather than mechanical.

It beat the 4Runner, the Pathfinder and the Montero to market by years. It had independent front suspension from day one. It was rebadged by Honda, Subaru, Acura, Opel, Vauxhall, Holden and Chevrolet, which is not something that happens to mediocre engineering. Its cargo capacity embarrassed vehicles a class above it. Its 3.2 V6 is one of the great unglamorous engines. Owners routinely take them past 300,000 miles. Off-road forums that have no reason to be sentimental describe its articulation, angles and axle strength as being about as good as it gets without a solid front axle.

And it never had a story. Mitsubishi had the Dakar and a nickname; Toyota had the Land Cruiser mythology; Jeep had a century of it. Isuzu had a conservative box and no marketing narrative at all, and then a magazine put a scarlet letter on it, and the American public — who had never quite understood why this thing cost as much as it did in the first place — simply stopped considering it.

And it isn't as though the press never noticed. Car and Driver put both of these into the same comparison test in 1992 — a six-vehicle field with the Explorer Eddie Bauer, the Grand Cherokee Limited, the Pathfinder SE and the Bravada alongside the Trooper LS and the Montero SR.

The Trooper won it. Outright, first place, ahead of the Grand Cherokee everybody remembers and the Explorer that outsold the lot of them. The Montero came fourth.

What won it is the thing this article has been circling from the beginning: structure. The magazine's judgment was that the Trooper's chassis was so stiff that it made every other system's job easier — suspension, drivetrain, controls, sound deadening — and that the absence of rattles and squeaks under hard use was the tell of a genuinely well-assembled vehicle. They granted that it was tall and square and unfashionable, and that on the road it felt tippy, like a catamaran riding on one hull. Then they noted that it steered and gripped in a way its height had no business allowing, and that the steering was smooth and progressive with none of the slop they found in the Explorer. Over big bumps off-road it was second only to the Grand Cherokee. Their verdict was that this was the Lexus of off-road vehicles, and their closing logbook note was the highest compliment a test car ever gets: The more I drive it, the more I like it.

The knock against it was one word long. Plain looks.

The Montero, meanwhile, was the tallest, longest and heaviest thing in the test — 4,399 pounds, more than a contemporary Caprice wagon — with 151 horsepower trying to move it. It was the second-slowest vehicle there and returned the worst fuel economy in the group. Testers found a dead spot on-center in the steering and felt the front wheels tugging at the wheel over small bumps. The three electronically adjustable damper settings, they reported, were indistinguishable from each other on a smooth road.

They liked its carrying capacity and its face, and they credited the genuinely good hardware: four-wheel ABS, full-time four-wheel drive with a locking center differential, headlight washers, that tool kit in the door. But the summary was that it was competent nearly everywhere and outstanding almost nowhere.

Look at the last row. As tested, the winning Trooper came in $48 cheaper than the Montero it beat — and it did that while going without the electric sunroof and headlight washers the Mitsubishi carried, which together accounted for nearly $1,300. It was also almost eight inches shorter and an inch lower, and it still held two cubic feet more cargo.

(A small archival note: the magazine's own spec panel lists the Trooper as an inline-six. The body text has it right — it was the 3.2-liter twin-cam V6.)

Then, four years later, the same magazine took seven fancy sport-utes to the edge of Death Valley to find out which of them still deserved the letters in the name — and the Isuzu in that field wore an Acura badge. No Trooper. No Montero at all.

That is the whole problem in a single editorial decision. The vehicle that had beaten the entire class on its merits four years earlier could only get back in the room wearing somebody else's name.

And look what happened once it did. The SLX carried the highest sticker in that 1996 field at $38,862, and the magazine largely thought it was worth it — the door thunk, the switchgear, the upholstery, the narrowest panel gaps of any vehicle there. They enjoyed the sheer altitude of the driving position and the enormous windshield. But the suspension had been tuned soft, for cruising rather than control, and it bottomed too readily off-road. It still had part-time four-wheel drive; Torque On Demand was two years away. The verdict was five words long, and brutal: More fashion-ute than sport-ute.

The same basic vehicle. Four years later. Dressed up, softened, priced higher, badged by a luxury brand — and judged accordingly. It is very hard to read those two tests back to back and not conclude that what happened to the Trooper's reputation had less to do with the truck than with what people were told it was.

The Pajero was the cooler one. The Trooper knew it, and never seemed to mind. That is a kind of confidence you don't see much anymore, in vehicles or in anything else.

What they cost, and why you should

Both are, right now, in the narrow window between "old truck" and "collector vehicle," and that window is closing.

The Trooper's average across tracked auction sales is $9,690. The Montero's sits a little above it, around $10,800 in average condition, with a record of roughly $25,500 set on Bring a Trailer in May 2024 and a low of about $3,300 recorded on the same site a month later. Meanwhile Kelley Blue Book still values a 2002 Trooper at $2,850 private-party. (Montero figures are tracked in sterling — £8,490, £20,109 and £2,630 — and converted here at approximate current rates.)

That spread — three thousand dollars of book value against nearly ten thousand at auction — is the entire opportunity. The market has decided these are collectible. Ordinary used-car pricing hasn't caught up yet. There are still clean, unmodified examples changing hands for the price of a laptop and a set of tires.

What to buy one for

Not as a garage queen. Buy one to build.

Both are close to ideal overland platforms and for the same set of reasons: a real ladder frame to bolt things to, torsion bars you can re-index for free once you've added weight, a coil-sprung live axle at the back that takes a load without collapsing, low range with genuinely short gearing, aftermarket suspension support from the Australian and South African markets where these never went out of fashion, and interior volume that lets you build a sleeping platform without a roof tent.

Add a second battery — the fourth-generation Pajero literally has a factory space for one — a fridge, a drawer system, a set of 33s, sliders, and a rear-mounted spare on that swing gate. You will have a vehicle that costs less than a used Tacoma, goes further than most of what shares the trailhead with it, and has interior space none of them can match.

What to check

Rust, first, last and always — frame rails, rear arches, the tailgate seams, and underneath the battery tray. Then oil consumption on any 1998–2000 Trooper V6: start it cold, watch the exhaust, check the level, and ask for records. Then the transfer case on both: cycle every mode, twice, and listen. On the Pajero, confirm 4H actually engages and disengages on the move; on the Trooper, confirm the TOD display isn't blinking a fault. Then service history on the automatic. Then everything else, which is mostly cheap.

The next chapter

And then, this year, something happened that nobody who loves these vehicles quite believed would.

On 29 May 2026, Mitsubishi Motors announced that its all-new cross-country SUV will be called Pajero, with a world premiere scheduled for this autumn.

Where it will be sold, Mitsubishi has not said. Not one market has been named.

Several outlets reported that the new car will wear the Montero badge in some markets, and read that as a signal about North America. Going back to the source, that isn't what the announcement says. The Montero reference appears in both releases as a footnote glossing the nameplate itself — sold, or known, as the Montero in some markets — sitting directly alongside an identically structured footnote explaining that the Triton is sold as the L200 in some markets. It is a naming note, not a distribution plan, and no territories are attached to it.

Worth remembering, too, why the Montero name exists at all: pajero is obscene in colloquial Spanish, so Spain and much of Latin America have always used the alternative. A footnote about the Montero badge does not, by itself, say anything about the United States.

So: hope, reasonably. But nobody has confirmed it, and this publication isn't going to be the one that says they did.

That was written in June. On 2 September 2026, Mitsubishi pulled the cover off, and the caution turned out to be the right call — in both directions.

What Mitsubishi actually confirmed

The car is real, it is the company's new global flagship, and it goes into production in Thailand, on the line beside the Triton. Thailand gets it first, with Japan and Australia following inside Mitsubishi's fiscal 2026, which closes at the end of March 2027. From fiscal 2027 it is scheduled for roughly 100 countries — ASEAN, Latin America, the Middle East. Brazil has already been confirmed by Mitsubishi's local arm, with no date attached.

And the Montero footnote is back, word for word in spirit. The production release says only that the Pajero nameplate is known as the Montero in some markets. Same naming note, same absence of any territory. Four months and a finished car later, it still is not a distribution plan.

The dials came back

And they did lead with the instrument cluster after all. The production car carries a digital Multi Meter recreating the triple gauges — altitude, compass, temperature, pitch, roll, and the status of the yaw control. Physical climate and drivetrain controls survive alongside two 14.3-inch screens. Five or seven seats depending on market, a second row that slides 5.9 inches (150 mm), and 18.3 cubic feet (519 liters) behind the third row when it is folded.

Forty years after a Paris–Dakar winner put three small gauges on top of a dashboard because a driver in a desert needed to know which way was up, the flagship that carries the name still puts them in front of you. Everything else on that dashboard is new. That is not.

The argument worth having

Here is where the enthusiasm needs a brake pedal, and it is the most interesting thing about the whole car.

Mitsubishi's own release does not call this the fifth-generation Pajero. It says there were four generations and 3.29 million vehicles, and then introduces this one. The press — and Mitsubishi Brazil — have called it the fifth. Fine. But the architecture underneath it breaks sharply with the third and fourth generations, which used monocoque construction with an integrated frame and were built in Japan. This one goes back to a separate ladder frame lifted from a pickup, and it is built in Thailand.

Conceptually, its closest relatives are the Pajero Sport, the Ford Everest and the Toyota Fortuner — larger, more refined and positioned above all of them, but the same idea. About 3.9 inches (100 mm) bigger than the outgoing Pajero Sport in several directions, and about 2.8 inches (70 mm) shorter than the current Land Cruiser Prado it is aimed at.

So the honest description is neither of the two on offer. It is not a rebadged Pajero Sport. It is also not a continuation of the last Japanese-built Pajero's engineering. It is a heavily reengineered Triton-based successor that collapses the Pajero and the Pajero Sport into one vehicle and puts the better name on it. Whether that counts as the Pajero coming back depends entirely on whether you loved the badge or the monocoque.

North America: still no

On 25 August 2026, a week before the reveal, Mitsubishi Motors North America said in as many words that no decision has been made about a United States introduction. That is the official position and it has not moved.

Separately, dealer-preview reporting says Mitsubishi has shown North American retailers a Montero-related rugged SUV and is weighing an arrival around 2030 — and that if it comes, it will likely need a different, probably electrified powertrain, because a Thai-built 2.4 diesel is not going to clear United States certification and customer expectation at the same time. Which means a North American Montero, if it happens, may share very little with the vehicle Mitsubishi just revealed beyond a name.

Everything in the paragraph above that is not attributed to Mitsubishi is reporting, not announcement. We are flagging that because this is the exact point in the story where, four months ago, the reporting ran ahead of the company — and the company turned out to be the one telling the truth.

It will sit on a ladder frame derived from the Triton pickup, with model-specific cabin, suspension and ride tuning rather than a straight parts-bin lift. Mitsubishi is positioning it as a genuine cross-country vehicle rather than another soft-road crossover, and industry reporting expects a plug-in hybrid variant to follow, aimed squarely at the hybrid Land Cruiser Prado and the coming wave of Chinese plug-in 4x4s.

Then, on 29 June 2026, came the second teaser — and it wasn't about the engine, or the chassis, or the screen. It was about the dials. Mitsubishi confirmed the triple meter is returning as a digital Multi Meter, showing altitude, heading, temperature, pitch and roll, and left-to-right torque distribution.

They led with the instrument cluster. In 2026. That is either very good marketing or a genuine understanding of what made the original special, and honestly, at this point, it doesn't much matter which.

Which is worth pausing on, because it's the second time this article has run into the same shape. The Pajero got fifteen more years than the Trooper did, and used them to become the default hard-country vehicle across half the planet — and it still didn't end on the merits. Neither of them was beaten by a better 4x4. They were both beaten by a change in what people wanted to be seen driving.

Isuzu, meanwhile, still builds the D-Max and the MU-X, still builds some of the best mid-size diesel trucks in the world, and still does not sell passenger vehicles in America. There is no Trooper coming back. There is no campaign to bring one back. There is just a lot of people, quietly, in a lot of countries, driving twenty-five-year-old ones and knowing exactly what they've got.

Verdict

If you made me pick, I'd pick the Pajero, and so would most people who have driven both. Super Select is the better system, the Dakar record is real rather than marketing, the parts support is stronger, the model kept developing for fifteen years after the Trooper stopped, and the second-generation car is one of the genuinely great shapes of the 1990s.

But that's not really the point of this piece, and I suspect you already knew it wasn't.

The point is that both of these existed at a moment when a manufacturer could build a tall square vehicle with visible bolts, a lever for the transfer case, a gate that swings sideways, three dials that tell you which way is up, and no apparent interest in whether it looked expensive — and could then sell it, profitably, to people who wanted exactly that. Function ran ahead of form because everyone involved understood that the form was the function. Nobody styled the visibility into these. They just made the windows big.

We don't get that anymore. What we get instead are vehicles with sealed underbodies, terrain-mode graphics on a screen, a camera to compensate for a roofline chosen by a marketing clinic, and about four inches of genuine clearance. Some of them are extremely good. None of them will be forty years old and still working in a country with no paved roads.

So: find one. A second-generation Montero with a clean frame, or a Trooper that somebody's grandfather changed the oil in religiously for twenty years. Pay too much for the good one rather than too little for the rough one. Put a rack on it, put a fridge in it, and take it somewhere you have to look at a map to find.

And when you're parked at the edge of somewhere, and the Jeeps and the Land Rovers are doing what they do — don't say anything. Just get the strap out when the time comes.

They'll do better next time.