Goodbye to the L300 van

The requirement for light-commercials to have Electronic Stability Control (ESC) before July 1 2015 means Mitsubishi has brought in its last ever shipment of the L300 van. Daniel Cook, head of marketing at Mitsubishi Motors New Zealand (MMNZ) says there are only 200 available and the marque expects to be out of stock before Christmas “There is no replacement - no other van is available to us,” says Cook. “We brought a lump of stock to get us through the calendar year and we decided not to get any more than that.” Cook says this was because it didn’t want to risk having a surplus of unregistered vehicles that couldn’t be sold after July 1. “We didn’t want to burden ourselves with it coming up to when that rule comes into force.” He says the older it became, the more popular it became – and sales have climbed since the decision was notified. “It is not a cornerstone model any more but it was very popular basically as a toolbox on wheel and a lot of our customers will be pretty disappointed about it not being around, but that’s just how it is. “It would have gone anyway. It was just a convenient time to wrap it up once that news came through. That decision was a final trigger for us.” Generally the L300 clocked up sales of at least 600 units per year. “We would like to have had it with ESC so that we could continue to sell it but that was not possible.”