The Mitsubishi i (三菱・i, Mitsubishi i) is a kei car from Japanese automaker Mitsubishi Motors, first released on January 24, 2006. It debuted twenty eight months after its introduction as a concept car at the 60th Frankfurt Motor Show in 2003, and its innovative "rear midship" layout proved an immediate critical and commercial success, exceeding Mitsubishi's initial sales targets by 20 percent and winning four major awards in its first year.
Explaining the choice of name, the company claimed that "i" could represent the owner (I, the nominative personal pronoun) as an encouragement to personal expression, or innovation, intelligence and imagination, keywords in the car's development. It is also a play on the Japanese word for love, pronounced /aɪ/. (more...)
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