Mitsubishi 380 2006 Problems

Rodney Jane of Bob Jane T-Marts reckons tyres are a grudge purchase and people nearly always want the cheapest rubber — but there is a sweet spot where you can get good value without compromising safety.

Use the manual shift as much as you can and anticipate the road ahead. When you're facing a hill, be ready to down-change manually without waiting for the transmission to do it for itself. Never let it lug at low revs in too high a gear. The other thing to be mindful of is servicing. The transmission fluid should be regularly changed, at least every 50,000 km if not before, and a full service is recommended around 100,000 km. By doing that you should be able to extend the life of your automatic transmission. Servicing is even more important if the transmission is made to work hard, such as when towing.

We haven't heard of other 380s that have suffered the same problem, but in the course of our checking we heard of a VZ Commodore that had the same problem when the accelerator pedal broke.

Mitsubishi first launched the 380 without an LPG option and the engine didn’t have the hardened valve seats needed for LPG operation, but when later it released the IMPCO vapour-injection system it also released LPG-compatible cylinder heads. Mitsubishi would tell you that engines like yours, without the LPG heads, shouldn’t be converted, but if you talk to people within the LPG industry you would be told that the IMPCO system is working well, without any problem, on engines with the LPG heads and those without. They add that because the valve seats harden naturally over time there is very little chance of having a problem with your engine even though it doesn’t have the LPG heads.

YES it is. And I'm told all spark plugs in the 380 are platinum-tipped, not just the rear plugs, as was the case in the Magna.