Given the price of motoring, particularly here in the UK, the small car market is huge and has been for a while. BMW decided to capitalise on this by buying Rover and stealing the MINI brand before leaving the rest of the company to die a slow and painful death.
With the politics of the once complexBritish car industry aside, BMW actually gave us a fantastic little car with the new Mini. In fact it was one of the best small hatchbacks that the world has ever seen and put VW’s retro re-invention, the new beetle in the shade- where it has stayed. It drove brilliantly, a fact only accentuated by the addition of a supercharger and an ‘S’ on the best Cooper model.
That was the R53, 52 and 50. The first BMW Mini Cooper S, Convertibles, Cooper and One, respectively. Theconvertible variants were pushing it a little, but the rest were relevant, well packaged, hatch-backs. With the second generation of new Minis things got a little bigger, looked a lot bigger, and in my opinion the brand has completely lost all meaning.
The Cooper S lost its supercharger in place of a turbo charged unit developed with Peugeot for there terrible 207RC. Despite the Peugeot connection, this was much better in terms of reliability and refinement than the Tritec botch job that actually came from Brazil and has very close relations with Chrysler- yuck. Build quality, although the cars were still built in the Oxford factory (in the UK at least), was much much better.
So whats the problem? Well played BMW… Actually no. It doesn’t end there. BMW are constantly dusting off Original Mini model names and assigning them to completely irrelevant modern ‘interpretations. The Clubman- a pointless estate type thingy, and the Countryman- a stupid reworked BMW X1 crossover which is also stupid and terrible. Don’t get me wrong. Sales are good. People actually buy these cars. But why do they have to exist? We have other manufacturers for that.
Surely this isn’t why BMW wanted the MINI name in the first place. There’s a coupe version for God’s sake! And now theres a coupe version of the crossover version, dubbed the Paceman! Seriously. And of course all of which come in One, Cooper, Cooper S, Cooper D, and Cooper SD specs. Oh and some with the option of all-wheel drive. To understand the MINI line up nowadays would be a feat worthy of a Nobel Prize.
Whats more, its about to become even harder to comprehend. The new (and in my opinion worst looking yet) hatchback will be available as a four door, presumably so that people desperate to be part of the MINI family have an excuse to buy that over a sensible Golf.
What is the point in all of this? Well I used to like MINI. I still think that the basic hatch is great, if a little expensive and over engineered. The reason for my (probably over-the-top) reaction here is this: There are plenty of direction that BMW could expand the brand, and make tonnes of cash in the process, that would be far more relevant and useful to us- the consumers.
I started this piece with a point about small cars. We love them here in the UK. Sometimes it seems that every other car on the road is a C1, 107, or VW Up. And you can see why. So where is MINI in all of this. Why hasn’t BMW, with the best brand for small car pedigree in the business, absolutely obliterated this market place? Arguably the most important and fastest growing car sector right now.
A cool city car is something that we don’t really have. Citroen badged a few of there C1’s as VTR models and Peugeot put some ludicrous red stripes and centre exit pipes on the 107 but the modifications to both are purely cosmetic and are minimal. What we need is a City Car hot hatch. Another 16V Lupo. A VW Up GTI if you will. MINI has all the ingredients: The engineering capability to build fantastic front-drive chassis, they certainly have the cash, and infinite heritage. A mini MINI would fly out of showrooms in their droves, surely.
They teased us a while back with an intriguing little concept called the ‘Rocketman’. Crap name I know, but at this point thats the least of our concern. It wasn’t much bigger than the original Mini, seriously. Next to most stuff on the roads today it would look tiny and it didn’t have the tall and skinny problem that all city cars seem to have these days. Most of the over the top design features would probably go and should go- in the pursuit of affordability if nothing else. And imagine a Rocketman S…
Seeing as they’re so obsessed with resurrecting old names, they could even call it the City. BMW- make it so.
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