Our experience with the Galant was in Southern California and it included a diverse menu of freeways, wide-open desert two-lane highways, and challenging mountain roads, a mix that produced mostly favorable impressions.Tops on this list was the performance of the V6 engine, which was uniformly strong, quiet, and eager in all our exercises, including altitudes that topped 5000 feet. Passing performance was brisk, and the responses of the transmission shift control program were right on the money, no matter what we demanded. Nothing fuzzy about this logic, at least in our experience.
Ride quality was also first rate, damping out nasty stretches of pavement very effectively. We were impressed by the noise suppression measures taken in this new car. Most highway and tire noise is transmitted through the suspension, and Mitsubishi has done a very good job of isolating the cabin from the suspension. The new Galant may not be quite as quiet as a Camry, but you'd need an accurate sound meter to measure the difference.
The Galant's handling traits, including the GTZ, seem to be balanced in favor of comfort over aggressive response. There's a little more body roll than you'd encounter in an Accord, and the defining characteristic is progressive understeer--the faster the car enters a corner, the less it wants to turn.
However, we found the Galant's steering to be reasonably accurate, with acceptable road feel once the steering wheel had moved a degree or two off dead center. The Galant is very forgiving to driver errors, such as braking hard in the middle of a turn; while some cars would spin out under these circumstances, we had no trouble controlling the Galant.
Braking--provided by discs up front, drums at the rear, discs all around in V6 models--seemed to be about average for this class. We prefer the superior fade resistance of an all-disc system. On the other hand, we didn't encounter any fade problems during our driving, despite repeated hard stops.
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