Mitsubishi Dusted Off a Sports Car Name and Put It on a Commuter

There's a version of this story where Mitsubishi deserves credit. The Eclipse Sportback EV doesn't look bad — The Drive said as much. It's arriving at dealerships sometime this year or in the 2026 calendar year depending on which source you believe, it's built on the Nissan Leaf platform, and it's priced in the neighborhood of $30,000. As a cheap commuter EV with decent bones, it has an argument to make.

But Mitsubishi didn't call it the Mitsubishi Something New. They called it the Eclipse.

The Name Is Doing Work the Car Can't

The Autopian noted this with the particular exhaustion of someone who's been burned before — the Eclipse is back, again, and it's not a sports car, again. The original Eclipse arrived in 1990. It was a sports coupe. It had a reputation. People bought posters. Now it returns as a rebadged version of one of the most recognizable budget EVs on the market, and the nameplate is the entire pitch.

This is what brand equity looks like when it's being spent rather than earned. The Eclipse name carries some residual heat — enough to get coverage, enough to get curious shoppers into a Mitsubishi showroom who might otherwise never have walked through the door. That's the calculation. Not whether a Nissan Leaf in a different jacket deserves to carry that history, but whether the name moves units. It probably will.

The uncomfortable thing is that nobody involved seems particularly embarrassed about it. Motor1 clocked that the 2027 Eclipse Sportback looks awfully familiar. InsideEVs called it the new(ish) cheap EV. The Autopian titled their piece like a man reading from a script he's seen before. The coverage is wry, a little weary, but not outraged — because somewhere along the way the industry normalized this. Nameplate resurrection stopped requiring authenticity. It just requires recognition.

What You're Actually Buying

Strip away the Eclipse badge and what you have is a Leaf-based commuter in a sportback body, positioned at a price point that actually makes sense for a lot of people. Around $30,000 for an EV with an established platform and presumably Nissan's drivetrain reliability baked in isn't a bad deal. The shape — and The Drive's observation that it doesn't look bad is worth taking seriously — suggests someone at least tried to make the thing presentable.

The Leaf itself is a known quantity. Not exciting, not the car you lie awake thinking about, but competent. Dependable. The kind of car that gets you where you're going without drama, which is exactly what most commuters need and almost none of them will admit they want.

So Mitsubishi has done something tactically sensible and creatively hollow: taken a reasonable car, wrapped it in a body that reads as sporty at a glance, and attached a name that once meant something different. The Eclipse Sportback EV will probably sell. It will probably satisfy the people who buy it. It will probably generate zero passion.

The Eclipse name used to be the kind of thing you remembered. Now it's the kind of thing that makes you remember.