I drove a 2016 Mitsubishi Montero Sport for a few days as part of a hire car.
We drove it from Manila to Little Boracay (Batangas and Tagaytay) and back, plus to MOP and MoA.
I think it’s normally ₱4.5k/day but we got a special price from Ace car rentals in Pasig.
They are a little hard to get to, but was the cheapest option available for a 6 seater.
It wasn’t our first preference. We really want to get a Toyota Innova, but this was what was available.
I’ve not driven a car that’s younger than about 20yrs old. So there was some things that surprised me.
It had keyless start. Or more like remote key. Not sure what you call it. You just have the key in your pocket or in the car.
You start the car by pushing your foot on the brake and then pressing the start engine button for 3s.
Instead of a physical park brake it was electric and you just flick the switch. I kept pulling it up to switch it off, trying to drive and finding out it was still on, so I hadn’t mastered it completely.
I probably needed to be putting my foot on the brake or something more.
The air-conditioning was great. There was plenty of cars belching smoke and we didn’t smell anything. Although I had a bit of a cold, so I probably wouldn’t have noticed except for increased coughing. Instead I think it must have a HEPA filter or at least something which made me not have to worry.
We couldn’t work out the controls for the aircon completely. I was busy trying to drive and my father kept getting cold and opening the window. There was two temperature controls and we couldn’t work out if they were for the front and back or left and right.
Especially as the back has their own fan controls in the ceiling, we guess it’s left/right.
Being a rental car we didn’t have much of a manual to check things and were busy with a family holiday and travelling so weren’t going to even google it. Esp as my Dad didn’t have mobile data, I was flat out and my wifey was busy with our two sons.
The car had a good ride. It was high up and easy to see around, although it was a little hard for me to fully see the outlines of the car.
When you go to reverse it after about 3s the centre display shows a reversing camera with lines and it has a proximity beep, which was definitely useful.
The main downside was the delay in showing the rear view. When you are trying to manoeuvre it was a pain to wait for it to appear.
I’d suggest getting your own dashcam that records both front and back and lets you see the rear view. That’ll likely help.
There was a USB socket, but it doesn’t output much juice. We travelled for about 4 hours to where the Floating Cottages are in Little Boracay and had my phone plugged in and it slowly lost power as I was using Google Maps.
I’d suggest you get a 12v USB adaptor which has a bit more wattage. My phone (Xiaomi mi 11 Ultra) supports 67w fast charging and I’m very grateful I had a decent fast charging battery pack which I could use to charge my phone with
Being a rental car there wasn’t a mounting point for the phone. There was an air vent which would have been good to use, but I don’t have any car mounting adaptor thing. So I just put the phone next to the gear stick and it fit well.
It was an automatic car. So I only needed to move my phone out of the way when I needed to make sure I was correctly selecting Reverse or Park vs Drive.
It was spacious and we fit all our stuff in the back row easily with the kids and my wifey in the middle row.
The headlights here in the Philippines seem to be much less powerful than in Australia. The high beam isn’t a more powerful beam, it just seems to let you see the light a bit higher. There’s also a low beam for better seeing what’s right in front of the car.
There’s a lot of buttons on the steering wheel and I often fumbled the lights versus the windscreen wipers. They are on different sides to what I’m used to.
Once we had a moment I paired my phone to the Bluetooth on the car and that worked well. I could listen to music and also hear the Google Maps navigation voice. The ability to change the track and volume using the lever and buttons on the left hand side of the wheel was nice.
I didn’t have an opportunity to play with the cruise control. There was just always something to worry about and I was always slowing down a little because of someone about to run out on to the road, drive in front of us, or I’d have to speed up to get around slow tricycles and jeepneys. But I also had no idea how to engage cruise control.
Our car hadn’t been fitted with the RFID / Autosweep which made going through the toll roads in the Philippines a lot harder. If you hire a car in Manila, you pretty much need one with RFID these days.
Overall, I’d say it was a nice car and we enjoyed our trip.
We don’t want to buy one as our worry is maintenance costs and so we are aiming for the Toyota equivalent as they’ve got a better reputation.
So yeah, brand does matter. It’s a good car, but unless I can see some great stats about how it’s not expensive to maintain and own, it’s not the car for us.
