Built at Mitsubishi’s Okazaki plant, the Outlander PHEV has already far surpassed Mitsubishi’s optimistic forecasts. First on sale in Japan in January of 2013, there have been over 8,000 orders with Japanese customers which is 4000 more than Mitsubishi’s target number.

In order to meet the larger than expected demand from customers locally and internationally, Mitsubishi has doubles the production capacity for the Outlander PHEV at the Okazaki plant to 4000 vehicles per month, and is effective imeediately.

At the start of next year, Mitsubishi will work to increase manufacturing efficiency and to decrease production costs to create more flexibility for future demand.

In Europe, which Mitsubishi forecasts to be the Outlander plug-in hybrid’s biggest market, already has over 10,000 signed orders since December 2012.

In terms of a balance between production capacity and demand, Mitsubishi Motors Company will introduce the new drive variant in October 2013 in European markets, starting with selected PHEV sales regions such as the Netherlands and Scandinavia. The other markets will follow successively from November 2013 to 1 Quarter of 2014.

North America is sometime after that still.