Mitsubishi SSS

There's a certain type of car that looks especially good in California.

Think of a silver Porsche 356 or an early 911, a BMW 2002, or an Alfa Romeo GTV, parked somewhere near Los Angeles with the Pacific Ocean in the background.

There's a quality to the light that makes these cars, silver ones especially, look extraordinarily crisp, with bright, almost blue-gold highlights across their upper surfaces, deepening into a warmer shimmer along the sides.

I unscientifically call the effect California crisp. It's not exclusive to California, but hot damn if it doesn't happen most days there. Naturally, if you're an automaker with a design studio in Southern California, why wouldn't you take advantage of cars that embrace it?

Enter the 2000 Mitsubishi SSS concept, one of those cars designed in exactly this Cali crisp environment that proves how dumpy the same shape can look elsewhere.

Created at Mitsubishi's Cypress, California design studio, the SSS was the third in a series of concepts exploring the company's so-called Geo-Mechanical design philosophy. It debuted at the 2000 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, proposing something Mitsubishi called an "enhanced utility sedan".

The idea was to combine the comfort and driving characteristics of a sports sedan with some of the practicality of an SUV. Today, that hardly sounds revolutionary, but Mitsubishi's execution was rather more interesting than the description suggests, and yes, beat the UK-designed Isuzu Zen by about a year.

For starters, the SSS is a remarkably clean piece of design. Its expansive, unbroken sides are almost completely free of interruptions, allowing light to play across the silver bodywork without door handles or conventional creases getting in the way. The exaggerated rear haunches, unusual side-window shape, and rounded nose give it something of the contemporary Galant, with hints of the bulbous, awkward Endeavor SUV that Mitsubishi would introduce a few years later.