Are you a handy hands on home mechanic, are you prepared to get down and dirty, service the thing regularly, including a transmission fluid change, and most importantly strip clean and lube the brakes and change the fluid?

If you are and you check the car out well before parting with the hard earned, then the Mitsis of this era are good cars.

Friction materials and regular service items might be a tad more expensive than the run of the mill but the cars are often more reliable than the european competition particularly in the electrical side and their mechanicals are usually well proven, but when you need specific to the model parts like headlights if you break one is where things can get expensive, for there simply isn't the aftermarket industry to the same degree.

I had a real headache sourcing headlights for my Outlander 1, OE parts some £350 a side and all the pre facelift Outlander 1 headlight lenses crazed, aftermarket non existant in left hand dip form, the car was reliable enough but it never really endeared itself to SWMBO so was shifted on and replaced with a Subaru.

If you need a mechanic to look after it for you, then there is nothing untoward on these, if anything Japanese cars tend to be designed to be maintained far more than the typical european models in my experience, but as i said before don't neglect the brakes because things like seized calipers on one of these is going to be more expensive to source than the typical car.