The Mitsubishi L200 Barbarian - Review & Road Test
We spend a week playing Bob the Builder with the car come pickup that is the Mitsubishi L200 Barbarian. Tax dodging pick-up or sensible compromise?
Meddling Governments have long distorted the car sales marketplace. Motorists are always seen as an easy target, and company car running motorists even more so. Since the last Labour lot came in there have been determined efforts to make the company vehicle an expensive luxury, despite the fact that many company vehicles are a necessity.
We also now have the bonkers idea that the amount of CO2 that comes out of your tailpipe should dictate how much tax you pay when you buy a car, tax a car, run a car or have it as a benefit in kind (BIK). That leads to ludicrous anomalies, like the £100k Tesla being virtually tax exempt because it is zero emission at the point of use.
Still, if you run your own company and want a bit of tax-free weekend fun you could always give Elon Musk a call and take one of his Lotus-based electric toys off his hands at three times the price the original Lotus is. Or you could be a bit more pragmatic and opt to buy a tax reducing Mitsubishi L200 Barbarian.
Not that the Mitsubishi L200 is good only as a toy. Far from it. It’s a very capable pickup with a decent load capacity, good towing capacity and a go anywhere, lug anything, unbreakable mentality which will always do what you want and get you where you’re going.
And because it is a pickup truck – albeit a pickup truck with a four door, five seat family car bolted on the front – the taxman treats it as a van which, for a 40 or 50% tax payer, could mean a tax cost of around £1.5k p.a. compared to over £10k on a similar specced and sized SUV. Makes you think.
You also start to think when you see what’s on offer. The cabin may not be the most sumptuous on the planet, but it’s far from shoddy. It comes with some decent looking – and quite comfortable – leather seats and toys like SatNav and Climate and there’s bags of room for not just kids in the back but full sized adults too.
The L200 Barbarian auto we have here is also not shockingly expensive. As it’s a commercial you should be able to get the VAT back, so you’ll be paying just £22,924. Which is not a whole lot of dosh for what is a five seat, semi-luxury, full-sized SUV.
So what’s the downside?
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