Total Complaints
2 filings
Mitsubishi Mighty MAX · model year
2 NHTSA complaints. A VIN lookup is required to determine whether a specific vehicle has an unrepaired recall.
NHTSA overall rating
Not crash-tested
New Car Assessment Program
The verdict
The 1985 Mitsubishi Mighty MAX posts top-10% complaint standing among its own model-year siblings.
The 1985MitsubishiMighty MAX carries 2 consumer safety complaints in NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation database for this specific model-year cohort. Within that volume, owners reported 0 crashes, 0 fires, 0 injuries, and 0 fatalities. No NCAP 5-star crash-test rating is available for this model year in the federal database.
The most frequently selected component label in reports for the 1985 Mighty MAX is fuel system, gasoline:storage:tank assembly with 1 filings, followed by engine and engine cooling (1). Complaint categories reflect owner reports and intake categorization; they do not establish a defect pattern or cause.
NHTSA currently has 14 investigation files overlapping the 1985 Mighty MAX. Owners comparing this cohort against neighboring years should read the complaint-by-year trend as report volume, not a causal diagnosis. Use the related-complaint feed and the official recall lookup when researching a specific vehicle.
PlainCars' own composite of NHTSA NCAP crash-test ratings and rollover-risk assessment, each dimension normalized against the federal scale or the full national model-year corpus. Not an official NHTSA figure, and not a substitute for a specific vehicle's VIN-level recall check.
Total Complaints
2 filings
Crashes Reported
0 reports
Source
NHTSA ODI
Federal complaints database
At or below the fleet median complaint volume.
| Component | Count |
|---|---|
| FUEL SYSTEM, GASOLINE:STORAGE:TANK ASSEMBLY | 1 |
| ENGINE AND ENGINE COOLING | 1 |
THIS VEHICLE IS A 1985 MITSIBISHI D-50 DIESEL PICKUP.EVERY THING HAS WORKED FINE UNTIL OCTOBER WHEN THE ENGINE TEMP OVERHEATED AND I BEGAN TO LOSE COOLANT OUT OF THE EXPANSION TANK. NOTED ALSO THAT THE TEMPRATURE GUAGE DID NOT READ HIGH . THE VEHICLE WAS TAKEN TO MITSIBISHI OF SAN DIEGO FOR EVALUATION OF OTHER PROBLEMS AS WELL AS THIS,AND WAS TOLD NOT TO WASTE ANY MONEY ON IT BECAUSE THE HEAD WOULD CRACK GUARANTEED AT 50,000 MILES .
VEHICLE LEAKES GAS FROM THE GAS TANK. PLEASE DESCRIBE.*AK
Data vintage: August 2026. Sources: NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) complaints database, NHTSA recall campaign API, NHTSA NCAP crash-test ratings, and NHTSA FARS for fatality cross-reference.
Every figure on PlainCars is rendered directly from NHTSA complaint and safety data, no number is typed in by an editor. This year-specific record is rendered from NHTSA ODI, recall, and NCAP rows for the 1985 Mitsubishi Mighty MAX; no figure is typed in by an editor. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error. Data current as of August 2026.
Read our methodology - how this data is sourced, computed, and verified.