Living in New York City, a place that is outwardly unfriendly toward cars, means I don’t get to see a ton of weird and interesting stuff on the street. However, every once in a while I’ll spot an absolute gem. In this case, it’s a seventh-generation Mitsubishi Minica parked down the street from my Upper East Side apartment. If you don’t know what a Mitsubishi Minica is, don’t worry. I didn’t either.
At a quick glance, this little white hatchback doesn’t look like much of anything. If I had to guess, out of every 1,000 people who walked by it, maybe three gave it a second look. I, of course, am one of those three. The first thing I noticed was the fact the steering wheel was on the wrong side. That immediately piqued my interest. The thing is, I had no idea what this car was. There’s no badging on the outside and I wasn’t about to peer into this person’s car to see what logo was on the steering wheel.
Luckily, the brain trust known as the Jalopnik group chat (more specifically Senior Editor Daniel Golson) almost immediately clocked it as a seventh-gen Minica. From there, I was pretty taken aback just thinking about who the hell would import something like this. I mean, on the face of it, the Minica is a pretty non-descript Kei car built from 1993 to 1998 by an automaker folks don’t really care for in the U.S. anymore. Hell, it’s not even one of the weird versions like the Minica Town Bee or Minica Toppo Town Bee. It’s just a basic hatchback. What would compel someone to bring this car over here? I can’t imagine how few of these things there even are stateside, because why would you bother when there’s so much more interesting stuff you can have now?
Adding to this car mystique is the fact that someone took the time to bring it here, but doesn’t really seem to have taken care of it. That is to say, it’s beat to shit. Every single panel has some sort of damage on it, there are a few different shades of white making up the bodywork and it even has mismatched wheels. This would make sense if this car spent all of its time in New York City, but it’s running on Virginia plates. What is going on here???
I tried to do some digging online to see if there were other seventh-generation Minicas for sale right now, and there are, but they’re few and far between. Most of them are retro-inspired special editions and other cargo variants. Even those cars only go for between $3,000 and $4,500. I suppose it is cheap transportation, but why go through all of the headaches of importing a car and driving on the wrong side of the road for something most people won’t ever look at? Is a 660-cc engine really worth that much to you?
I don’t know what sort of person you’d have to be to live like that, but I’m sort of glad they’re out there. It keeps things interesting for dorks like me. If you do happen to be the weird little guy who owns this Minica, please reach out to me. I just want to talk.
