Mitsubishi ASX VR-e 2026: Australian price, release date and specs

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Mitsubishi is bringing a pure electric vehicle back to the Australian market for the first time in roughly 14 years since the i-MiEV, and this time the familiar ASX name goes to a completely different car. The ASX VR-e arrives in the fourth quarter of 2026 and isn’t based on the petrol-powered ASX at all — it’s built on the platform of Taiwan’s Foxtron Bria. Four grades are confirmed for Australia: LS, Aspire, Exceed and GSR.

This isn’t a simple badge job. Mitsubishi has been involved in locally tuning the car for Australia and New Zealand, even though the underlying engineering remains the same Foxtron Bria that debuted in Taiwan — a joint venture between Foxconn and Yulon. Back in spring, brand representatives said chassis tuning specifically would be one of the ways the Mitsubishi version differs from the source car.

Final specifications for the ASX VR-e haven’t been fully revealed yet, so the Bria’s figures can’t automatically be treated as the spec sheet for every Australian variant. The Taiwanese donor car uses a 57.7 kWh LFP battery. The rear-wheel-drive version makes 171 kW — about 233 hp — and is rated at 516 km on the lenient NEDC cycle. DC fast charging tops out at 134 kW, with a 10–80% charge claimed in under 30 minutes.

The all-wheel-drive Bria variant is noticeably quicker: output sits around 299 kW, or roughly 407 hp, with 0-100 km/h taking 3.9 seconds. For that version, the source car claims 466 km NEDC. Australia’s stricter WLTP methodology should produce lower figures — Drive expects around 430 km for the rear-drive variant and about 400 km for AWD.

The Bria measures 4,315 mm long, 1,885 mm wide and 1,535 mm tall. Standard equipment on the source car includes a 15.6-inch central touchscreen, a 9.2-inch digital instrument cluster and an independent five-link rear suspension.

Mitsubishi hasn’t announced pricing yet. Drive estimates around A$40,000, though that figure can’t be treated as an official price. For comparison, the already-launched GWM Ora 5 in Australia starts at A$33,990 drive-away, competing in the same affordable EV space alongside the MG4 and BYD.

Competition is already reshaping the market here: in February 2026, China became the largest source of imported vehicles for Australia for the first time, accounting for roughly a quarter of the market. For Mitsubishi, the ASX VR-e’s Taiwanese origins are therefore not just a faster route to an EV, but a way into a segment where Asian rivals are already competing hard on price and model turnover.

Mitsubishi Motors Australia CEO Shinichi Kihara said: “The ASX VR-e marks an important milestone for Mitsubishi’s renewed line-up as our first BEV since the i-MiEV — Australia’s first mass-market electric vehicle. It joins a growing range of vehicles with different powertrain types, developed and tuned for the Australian lifestyle as part of our Momentum 2030 plan, which calls for the electrification of new models in the coming years.”

The biggest unknown now isn’t the Foxtron engineering — it’s Mitsubishi’s Australian pricing and final specification list. The brand has promised to reveal both closer to launch in the last three months of 2026.