It’s a genuine world debut, but you need to look twice – and in this case that’s actually the best news they could have hoped for, because although virtually every panel has changed significantly, and lots of hardware under the skin has changed with it, the new MINI is still totally a MINI, and that was just how they planned it.
You wouldn’t, after all, want to turn your back on a car that so successfully re-invented an apparently irreplaceable icon that it has defied all normal sales patterns, and whose biggest cause of worry to its makers is that they just can’t build enough of them to satisfy demand.
More than 875,000 cars to date in the five years since it was introduced, and selling as quickly as they can get them onto the boats, in markets from Europe to the USA. So what’s to want to change? In fact the answer was pretty well everything, to add space, safety, performance, efficiency and comfort, to further stretch the character of MINI as a premium product, and to make sure that that incredible sales plateau stays on the straight and level for a long time still to come.
In a way, they’re the victims of their own MINI success – in many ways, dynamically and especially in terms of underlying engineering quality, the car has raised the bar for the whole segment, and to stay ahead it has to move on.
And what does change? Well, it’s a bit bigger in most respects, but the only places you might notice it are in the mildly reshaped bonnet, the more pronounced rear shoulders and the squarer, slightly chunkier backside, and none of those looks like anything but a MINI. At the front the fractionally longer nose reflects a new, simpler, cheaper to build design, and more space for the brand-new four-cylinder engines underneath it. At the back it means a bit more luggage space, but it still isn’t much use for moving house, and it’s never going to be – but that isn’t the point, it’s a MINI.
Inside, it is also extensively updated but again without losing the essential, much-loved character. The instrument layout is simpler and slightly less stylised, and the rev-counter is less awkwardly placed, but the signature large speedometer survives, and although the whole detail is neater and even more up-market, it couldn’t seriously be anything else.
The biggest change, though, is the totally new range of 1.6-litre engines – starting with a naturally-aspirated 120bhp in the Cooper and a turbocharged 175bhp in the Cooper S, with a 95bhp 1.4 version to follow early next year in the entry-level MINI One. And although performance is improved, so is fuel efficiency, so yet again the new MINI matches the theme of the week.
Just another 35 years of this kind of success and it will have outlived the original.
