Review: Mini Cooper
Who doesn’t remember the Mini? Wonderful little car! If common sense had prevailed they’d still be making them today, and we’d be forming queues to buy them.
What crap! As with most of their projects in the 1960s and 1970s the Poms went on making the same thing for far too long, and by the time mainstream production was discontinued the little car had been left far behind by better engineered vehicles. I’ve just read a road test in a 1968 British magazine, Motor, and the editors had a long list of criticisms of the 1 000cc Mk II version.
Comments? “Some more recently designed cars have pushed it several places downwards in the cornering-power/handling league”; “dismally uncomfortable” for drivers of average height; an “objectionably stiff” gear change; an absence of syncromesh on first gear that was “tedious rather than endearing”; “wobbling oversteer” when braking on uneven roads; “indifferent” brakes badly affected by water splash; poor seats — “a tall driver who has the strength of will to travel for two or more hours without stopping may begin to suspect that he has diseased kidneys or a slipped disc, so punishing is the backache which assails him.” But despite a surfeit of road noise, the tester found that there was relatively little wind noise, “and the level does not increase if the foremost sliding side-window is pushed backwards, so that the driver can obtain useful ventilation provided there is no one else in the car to suffer the draughts that circulate in consequence.”
Phew — and that’s in a British magazine.
All of which means we can be thankful the new BMW-engineered half-breed Mini doesn’t take up where the old thoroughbred British one left off.
Its 1 598cc fuel-injected transversely mounted four-cylinder 16-valve twin-cam engine produces 85kW — more than triple the output of the original single camshaft overhead-valve 850cc unit.
Acceleration to 100kph takes well under 10 seconds, where the original would have been lucky to do it in much under half a minute, and the Mini Cooper’s top speed is comfortably over 200kph — the 850 topped out at a tad under 120. Disc brakes all round, supported by ABS and all the other letters of the alphabet, make sure it stops as well as it goes and, we’d presume, work as well in the wet as they do in the dry.
Traction control. Power steering. Air bags. Air con. Electric windows and an optional massive sunroof. A surprising amount of interior accommodation. Superb build quality. And a price tag of R157 500 for the five-speed manual version — rather higher than the price of the original, even allowing for inflation.
At the Durban launch I had the opportunity to drive both the automatic and manual versions of the Mini Cooper. I think an auto box is wasted on a fun little car like this, but a fair number of buyers in this price range will probably fancy the option, which works well enough.
The manual version of the car surprised me in the way that it actually reminded me of the original despite being so different. The seats are comfortable, leg and head room are surprisingly generous, and performance is lively, but the firmly suspended wheel-in-each-corner feel remains the same without being harsh, and the view over the bonnet is pure Mini. Build quality, however, is definitely BMW rather than BMC.
The new Mini Cooper is a bit of a pretender — a classy car masquerading as a cheapie. Where the original was aimed at people who couldn’t afford anything bigger or better, the new Mini is a really class act intended as a second or third car for those with lots of money to spare.
The value-for-money Daihatsu Cuore comes much closer to the original Mini in terms of philosophy — nippy, cheap, compact motoring for the masses, but as a representation of what the Mini should have evolved into after four decades, BMW’s got it right with the Mini Cooper. Can’t wait for the supercharged Cooper S, though.