The Mitsubishi Outlander arrives in a cloud of dry ice and a thick snowfall of corporate brochures. This is the launch model for Mitsubishi's new European operation, which intends to lavish no fewer than 13 all-new cars upon us over the next five years. Meanwhile, it is the duty of the Outlander to carry not only you, your children and their school bags, but also the flag for an expensive exercise in re-branding.
Hence the new, thumping great single-strut grille (more like a factory air vent than a car radiator) and the prouder-than-proud, tea-plate-sized Mitsubishi badge embossed on the nose. Get knocked down by an Outlander and you'll be wearing that badge for ever on your buttocks.
Those details aside, though, the Outlander is less a manifesto announcing a brave and glistening vision of the future than a lively statement of things as they are. It's a kind of compressed sports utility vehicle, or a slightly shrunken, mid-powered, four-wheel-drive off-roader. True, you can buy it in forward-looking, planet-pleasing dual-fuel versions. But in its design and purpose one can pick out the familiar weave of two well-established contemporary lines of thought.
Firstly, in looking as though it might recently have seen service on behalf of the allied forces in Iraq, the Outlander attests eloquently to the increasing militarisation of family motoring in our times. In the grip of this mindset, which is a form of anxiety, it is no longer sufficient that your car creates for you the sensation, however illusory, of personal safety (a more sympathetically bumpered second-hand Volvo could do that for you); the car must appear also to be actively hostile, ready to protect you from the world by taking the world out, if necessary.
On the Outlander, for instance, the puffy wheel arches, the thickly ridged bonnet and visible front-end skid-plate all say, to anyone going by, "Stand off, buster. Back away from the car and get where I can see you." The Outlander is meant to look battle-ready, and to offer at least a hint that, as well as a boot-mounted CD multi-changer, an emplacement for a rear machine gun may be available as an optional extra. It is designed to repel boarders, be they cats, urban foxes, squeegee men or whatever other enemy forces lie in wait for one along the road to one's local out-of-town shopping centre.
At the same time (and perhaps partly as a mask for this overt and unsettling aggression), the car must also seem to have blown in from, or be on its way to, somewhere rural and leafy. These days, cars that are built principally to meet the limited challenge of the most banal roster of urban chore-running must also appear to be tilted towards the aspiring frontiersman and part-time deer hunter and logger. Thus this now familiar hybrid of the bellicose and the agricultural. Ee-aye-addio, the famer wants a tank.
And thus the name Outlander. To ask the obvious question: outlander than what? It's not even outland-ish. Yet that whiff of untrammelled voyaging is an essential part of the package. There were the early American SUVs - the Explorer, the Adventurer. Now there's the Land Rover Freelander, the Nissan X-Trail and (my favourite) the Subaru Forester, a car so urban in outlook that it rarely even gets to be parked under a tree, let alone in a forest, and would be about as much use to you on a journey through thickly wooded terrain as a fibre-glass hang-glider. The Mitsubishi Suburbia or Subaru Outskirt would be more like it, but we shall all be very old indeed before the car industry owns up so openly.
With the Outlander, as with all compromised-at-birth vehicles, you could end up wishing you had a car that did one job properly, rather than two jobs in a middling kind of way. The Outlander is definitely no rugged toiler on the soil, nor intended to be. Crash an Outlander into a passing cow and you can be almost certain that it will be the cow that drives away unhurt while you limp about looking for your hubcaps and door panels. Yes, you get to sit up high and enjoy a commanding view of the road. But that height, and the inevitably baggy steering that is its consequence, mean that the Outlander is not as manoeuvrable as a saloon car, and is therefore altogether less handy in the town when you need to get out of the way of something - another poorly driven Outlander, for example.
The idea underpinning the Outlander, and a hundred contemporary cars like it, is that it's a jungle out there. But for Outlander drivers it more than likely isn't a jungle at all: it's a traffic jam, mostly made up of other Outlander-sized vehicles crawling slowly through a series of traffic-calming devices on the way to a primary school in a restricted parking zone. The purpose of having all-wheel-drive capability for these circumstances remains hard to fathom. Then again, maybe the speed bumps round your way are taller than they are round mine.
