Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross review

The Eclipse Cross carves a lot of people space from its compact footprint. You sit in the usual throne-like crossover attitude up front. Out back, there's top-class leg room, and foot space under the front seats. Enough headroom too (just), but then you couldn't expect more when you see the roof-line.

Open up the tailgate and the reason becomes clear. The boot isn't very big. Not fore-to-aft because the rear seats are set well back, nor indeed top-to-bottom because the luggage blind is set low down so you can see out of the spilt rear window.

There's an answer. You can slide the back seat bench forward, either one-third, two-thirds or all of it. This adds boot space, although this leaves endless possibilities for small clutter to disappear into the seat sliding mechanism, never to be seen again. The rolled up blind stores under the floor, handily.

The strongly three-dimensional dashboard emerges at you in a series of tiers, like the architecture of a sports stadium. It looks good, though does force some compromises, like hiding the climate controls in a deep dark recess. Still, at least they are proper controls, not virtual ones lost behind layers of screen menus.

Some of the other switchgear is scattered around with little apparent clarity or logic. By the time you've rooted around and found the lane departure or collision warning system switches, you might have already had the collision.

The dials and screens are clear enough, and top versions have a head-up display. Infotainment is controlled by a touchscreen or well-designed trackpad controller down in the centre console. Mirroring of Apple or Android phones is standard, just to add to the user-friendliness.