The 2.6 was that awful "It's-A-Shitty" 4, wasn't it?  I remember the
2.2 as a tough little mill that had a few eccentricities, but anything
from Mitsu generally seems to suck.

I don't know if this is widespread, but from what I've seen out on the
road, "It's-A-Shitty" (Mitsubishi) seems to have trouble designing and
building reliable power.  Many's the time I've seen a Mitsu pickup,
Montero or Gallant tooling down the road with thick trails of oil mist
coming out of the tailpipe.  Also I've seen catastrophic failures,
like clouds of steam belching from back.  Not long ago, I saw a
Gallant scatter its crankshaft right through the oil pan in the middle
of an intersection, an interesting failure to see, to say the least.

My dad has one of the "box" Monteros for a short while...one of the
worst cars he ever owned.  At 32K miles, #3 piston collapsed.  After
that fiasco, at 37K, he started losing oil pressure and getting main
bearing noise, so he dumped it.  He's not as big a fanatic about
routine maintenance as I, but pretty close, being an ex-Air Force
maintenance officer in the '40s, so this thing had clean oil and fresh
coolant on time.  After dumping that  turkey, he said to me, "How in
the hell did they build all those damned planes in the war?  Maybe we
weren't shooting them down...they were falling on their own!"

It seems that Daimler was quite right in dumping its Mitsubishi
holdings, which were the crown jewel of Lee Iacocca's grandiose plan
to form "Global Motors" along with Daimler-Benz in the '80s.  Daimler
moved Iacocca out, did pretty much what he wanted to do originally,
found Mitsubishi to be a loser and dumped it.