Junkyard Find: 1990 Mitsubishi Galant GS-X
As we’ve seen in this series, Coloradans bought plenty of all-wheel-drive-equipped AMC Eagles, VW Quantum Syncros, Audi Quattros, and Toyota All-Tracs during the 1980s. The suits at Mitsubishi Motors saw all those AWD-enhanced car sales in snowy American regions and decided to sell some rally-influenced Galants on our shores. A few decades later, this rare-but-not-valuable Galant GS-X appeared in a Colorado Springs self-service car graveyard.
I see the occasional street-driven Galant VR-4 around Denver, so I always check for examples of those rare turbocharged machines when I hit the local boneyards. No luck on that so far, but I did manage to find the VR-4’s naturally-aspirated sibling.
This was around the time that Toyota managed to sell a handful of Camry All-Tracs in North America, and the Galant GS-X was a cheaper and sportier all-wheel-drive sedan that may have pried a couple of sales away from Toyota salesmen. Of course, Mitsubishi’s viscous-coupling AWD system wasn’t as sophisticated as All-Trac (or Quattro), but it worked well enough in snow or mud.
The engine was a DOHC 4G63 four-cylinder rated at 135 horsepower, and we can assume it now lives on in some hot-rodded Eagle Talon blatting out its mating call on I-25.
I’m sure GS-X buyers could get an automatic transmission if they so chose, but this car had the five-speed manual.
The gauge cluster has the slushbox gear indicator, however, so we may be looking at a car that began its career with two pedals. I think it’s more likely that it had a cluster swap due to bad gauges, though; I put an automatic cluster in my 5-speed Civic a while back, because I couldn’t find a cluster from a manual car in sufficiently nice condition.
With that in mind, this just-over-100k odometer reading should be viewed with some skepticism.
Galant GS-Xs and VR-4s pack a certain amount of historical significance, since they led directly to the creation of the Lancer Evolution, but their real-world monetary value doesn’t come to much. Still, exactly the kind of car I want to find when I’m in the junkyard.
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Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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The off-road pictures w/mountains in the background are cute but no one that buys a FS SUV in that price range in the 21st century wants or needs it for that. The off-road vehicles go inside an enclosed trailer and are towed behind the SUV. As already mentioned above, due to it being a low on power there are much better options than the LC.
I love the interiors in vehicles of this era, especially this one. The dash design seems so layered and three-dimensional, though simple. By the end of the nineties, interiors became generally flat, generic, and boring. The interior of the next-gen Gallant was indistinguishable from anything else out there.