Mitsubishi Shogun (2007 – 2019) Review

The 2007 Mitsubishi Shogun is one of those cars that’s good at a very specific job. If you want an affordable car that’ll take seven people deep into the countryside, possibly pulling a horsebox at the time, and you’re not overly concerned about how comfortably or luxuriously it does the job, then the Shogun could be just the job. If, however, you’re after anything more than that, such as a civilised everyday seven-seater family car with a reasonable amount of comfort, luxury and refinement, then there are numerous other large 4x4s out there that will suit you better...

Amazing what a difference a few years makes, isn’t it? Once upon a time (we’re talking back in the nineties here), the Mitsubishi Shogun was the ultimate must-have accessory for the countryside set.

Back then, it was one of the few cars on the market that could pull a Palomino-filled horsebox to little Petunia’s gymkhana, with room in the boot for all her tack, while making just the right statement about owning a car solely and specifically for that job. For the green-welly brigade, it was a symbol of membership. For a time.

As the years rolled by, though, the Shogun’s appeal waned. It never lost any of the ability that made it popular - to this day, it’s still unstoppable off-road, hugely practical and impressively durable - it’s just that other cars came along that delivered all those same abilities, but with way more comfort and luxury thrown in, meaning less in the way of compromise. And for the well-heeled folk in question, that was temptation too strong to bear.

But instead of abandoning its roots and trying to compete with newer competition on luxury and comfort, Mitsubishi decided to just keep doing what it had always done. And that means that the Shogun has changed very little over the years. In fact, the car that went off sale reasonably recently in 2019 was hardly any different mechanically to the third-generation car that was released around the turn of the millennium. 

It has a pulling capacity of up to 3.5 tonnes, and with a huge cabin and seven seats, it’s enormously practical. It’s solidly built, impressively reliable, comes with a decent amount of standard kit and it’s pretty affordable.

The flipside of Mitsubishi’s approach, though, was that in the areas in which it struggled, it felt more and more out-of-date as the years went.

In comparison to ever-evolving rivals, ride quality that started off being irritatingly jittery became borderline unbearable, while rolling refinement that was rather rowdy became a downright assault on the senses.

Stepping into the cabin, meanwhile, is like stepping back to the 1990s due to the dated nature of its design and materials, and if you compare the safety and infotainment kit available with that available in rivals, there are some very glaring omissions (automatic emergency braking and Apple Carplay/Android Auto, anyone?).

There are still a few hardcore fans kicking about who still love the Shogun for its unapologetic ruggedness and its refusal to dumb down on that in the pursuit of economic success. And for those people, who use their car within a very narrow operating window, it works just fine, thank you very much.

For the majority of today’s SUV buyers, though, who couldn’t give a flying mud-pie about off-roading ability and are far more interested in comfort, luxury, refinement, safety and gadgetry, there are literally dozens of other big 4x4s out there that will suit them better.

Unsurprisingly, the Shogun’s performance in this area will vary greatly depending on whether you go for the short-wheelbase three-door model or the more popular long-wheelbase five-door. The former isn’t great with no-more-than-adequate interior space, difficult access to the rear seats and a fairly small boot.

Naturally, the (much) bigger car does a lot better. The rear seats have enough room for tall adults to sit comfortably, and two more seats pop up out of the boot floor to make the bigger Shogun a seven-seater, but although adults can just about fit in them, they won’t be very comfortable. Most other seven-seat SUVs are roomier in the third row.

With all seven seats in place, there’s room for a few small bags in the boot, more than in some rivals. Fold down the rearmost chairs, which drop flush into the boot floor, and the boot space you get is every bit as huge as you expect.

The middle row folds in a 60-40 split, and then tumbles forward to give you a flat loadbay that’s impressively enormous, but the loadbay is inevitably shorter than in rivals where the middle seats fold flush into the floor.

 Your eyes are met with swathes of dark plastic that look sturdy, robust and hard-wearing, resulting in a very solid feel that gives the impression that the Shogun is built to last. 

However, not many concessions are made to tactility. While most modern SUVs are trimmed in sophisticated soft-touch materials, the Shogun’s plastics are hard and scratchy, and less appealing to the fingertips as a result.

Not many concessions are made to design flair, either. There’s the odd metallic trim piece or various smatterings of unconvincing wood-effect panelling, but other than that, it’s all very samey.

We never had the chance to encounter an entry-level SG2 Shogun, so we can’t tell you how easy or difficult its infotainment system was to use, but we can tell you that it was very much more basic than in other versions.

You got a CD player, USB sockets and a Bluetooth phone connection, but that was about it. Upgrading to SG3 trim checked most of the outstanding boxes, with a 7.0-inch touchscreen system that brought satellite-navigation, DAB radio and a Rockford Audio system with 12 speakers.

SG4 and SG5 versions used the same system, but in the SG4, you also got rear-seat entertainment screens that were built into the headrests of the front seats.

The touchscreen is reasonably responsive, but the graphics look very dated and some of the on-screen icons are small and fiddly. The menus aren’t that logically arranged, either, so it’s not the most intuitive system you’ll ever encounter. What’s more, the system is too old to offer Apple Carplay or Android Auto, so you can’t just ignore the car’s operating system and use your phone’s instead.

At the time it went off sale, the Shogun’s prices ranged from below £30,000 at the bottom of the range to over £40,000 at the top.

This made it much, much less expensive than luxury seven-seat SUVs like the Audi Q7 and Volvo XC90, along with the other obvious serious off-roader with seven seats, the Land Rover Discovery. It was still a fair bit pricier than rivals like the Hyundai Santa Fe, Kia Sorento and Skoda Kodiaq, though.

However, because this generation of Shogun has been on sale for such a long time, used buyers can pretty much pay as little or as much as they want for one.

Prices range from a few grand for early, high-mileage, low-spec examples, to upwards of £35,000 for last-of-the-line range-toppers. It really is a case of paying your money and making your choice.

It looks even thirstier when you consider that this figure was delivered in NEDC tests rather than the later WLTP standard that the rest have since been tested against, that was designed to better reflect real-world conditions, and thus gave worse figures.

That said, the nature of the engine (large capacity, low state of tune) means you should stand a decent chance of replicating that figure in the real world if you’re extra-careful, and getting reasonably close if you drive normally.

There have been variations in insurance groupings for the Shogun down the years, which is no surprise given how long it's been on sale.

Most versions sit between groups 30 and 35, with one or two editions randomly making it up as far as 38 or 39. Those groupings are reasonably comparable with those of rivals, and while this certainly won’t be a cheap car to insure, it won’t be desperately expensive, either.

If you’re wondering about reliability, think about how many old Shoguns you still see pounding around the streets to this day, and you’ll realise that it’s quite a few. This is a car built to stand up to the rigours of tough use, and that means it’s pretty hardy.

It has a ladder-frame chassis, and that’s an approach usually reserved for pick-up trucks rather than road cars.

As such, it’s no surprise that the Shogun feels pretty uncultured on the road. Regardless of the state of the surface, the car jitters and judders constantly, making the ride feel really unsettled, while undulating roads cause the body to pitch and bounce on its soft suspension.

This soft suspension also means that the body leans over rather a lot in bends, even at very modest speeds, while the slow steering will have you twirling away at the wheel.

However, while the Shogun is borderline unbearable on the road, it’s borderline unstoppable off it. That body-on-frame construction, high ground clearance, selectable four-wheel drive, low-range gears and a locking centre differential mean that few cars will match the Shogun in the rough stuff, allowing you to scramble up rocky slopes and down muddy banks easier than getting to the shops.

While lots of things about the Shogun changed over the many years of its life, the engine was a constant. Only one was offered, a 3.2-litre four-cylinder diesel.

Associated numbers changed over time, such as the fuel economy, CO2 emissions and power output. However, variations in the latter were small, and it was always somewhere in the region of 200PS.

Even so, this was not a fast car. That’s not to say it was slow - the 0-62mph dash stood at around ten or eleven seconds, depending on the version - but the build-up in speed was always gradual and relaxed. That said, the engine always had enough muscle to keep life relatively easy, and the engine’s brutish low-down muscle also helped great when off-roading and towing.

Early Shoguns were offered with a choice of manual or automatic transmissions - both five-speeders - while later examples were only offered it auto’ form. It was fine, swapping gears reasonably smoothly if not desperately quickly, just like you’d expect in a car like this. We never got to try the manual, though.

Believe it or not, in more than 35 years on this earth, the Shogun has never been crash tested by Euro NCAP. However, with the strictness of today’s safety standards, that might be just as well.

The bare basics are covered, including stability and traction controls, anti-lock brakes, Isofix child seat mounting points, tyre-pressure monitoring and six airbags (twin front, side and curtain). So, it complies to legal standards, but that’s about it.

There’s none of the latest accident-prevention gear you get in the most rival SUVs, things such as automatic emergency braking, lane change assistants, blind spot monitors, traffic sign recognition, any of that. So, safety-wise, you’ll be sat in something big, but not awfully clever.

The Shogun is a tower’s favourite, and it’s very ebay to see why. The long-wheelbase model has a maximum towing capacity of 3500kg, which is about as good as it gets for a road car, and the hardcore off-roading kit means you should be able to pull whatever you’re pulling across a muddy field, a soggy beach or halfway up a mountain.

Throughout the Shogun’s long life, it has gone through several changes in trim structure and specification, so it’d take all day to go through all of them. Here, we’ll focus on later examples of the car, but bear in mind that there will be differences in specification on earlier cars.

So, towards the end of the Shogun’s life, the entry-level trim was known as the SG2, and came with 18-inch alloys, front foglamps, automatic lights and wipers, climate control, electric windows, electric door mirrors, keyless entry, cruise control heated front seats and a leather steering wheel.

However, the SG2 missed out on a few bits we’d deem necessary in a car like this, those being rear parking sensors, a reversing camera and leather seats, on top of the key infotainment kit we mentioned earlier.

Those boxes are all checked by SG3 trim, along with ones for rear privacy glass, an electric sunroof, automatic high-beam headlights and powered front seats, making it our favourite trim level.

SG4 trim only adds the rear-seat entertainment screens mentioned earlier, and 20-inch alloy wheels that make the ride a little bit worse, so we’d avoid it. SG5 trim deleted the rear screens, but instead added quilted leather upholstery, heated rear seats, two rear USB sockets and LED mood lighting.