Inside job: the new MINI

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New MINI is very different. Rather unfortunately emphasised by BMW's decision to badge it with capital letters, it is almost 18in longer than its predecessor. Yet in day-to-day use it will provide comfortable lodgings for only two people, not four. Yes, cars are more complicated now, capable of withstanding a 30mph trip every whichway into a crash barrier, replete with airbags, and people are notably larger - but to lose a decently functional rear seat in a hatchback labelled MINI seems more wilful than careless.

This seat has an oddly long cushion, presumably because it sits atop both the fuel tank and a complex multi-link rear suspension. But it is so lengthy that, with the front seats set to accommodate a standard-size driver and accomplice, there's minimal legroom in the back.

And life in the front? Original Mini wasn't really designed in the catchall sense that the word is bandied around today. Alec Issigonis sketched the spartan interior, with a simple facia which featured a centrally mounted speedometer - to ease left- and right-hand drive manufacture - a full-width steel parcel shelf and door bins painstakingly sized to store selected ingredients for a decent Martini, his chosen tipple.

New MINI is as relentlessly honed as a Madonna pop video, serving as proof that fun, rather than function, is BMW's rationale for this car. Predictably, it takes basic Original Mini shapes and concepts, and renders them in widescreen: the central speedo, the two-spoke steering wheel, the vaguely elliptical dashboard architecture and, even,

an open area at the bottom of the centre-stack beyond which you can spy the black metal guts of the heater.

This is a scarily literal update of Issigonis's vision, garnished with implied sportiness - a tachometer brashly mounted on the steering column in a perfectly rendered interpretation of an old Mini modification every reader of Cars and Car Conversions magazine felt obliged to fit in 1968.

Beneath the speedometer, BMW has even reintroduced toggle switches on the console, now cutely shielded to prevent occupant injury in a crash. Like much of the interior, the centre stack is in plastic, painted to resemble steel - less good to touch than to glance at; door pockets - sized more for a can of Lilt than a bottle of Gordon's - are fringed in an oval of plastic and include a padded armrest.

Because it was intelligent and self-effacing, Original Mini became a classless, ageless status item. New MINI begins life as a fashion statement and continually revels in its own self-consciousness. And that's another reason to shed a tear.

Cathryn Espinosa; The Telegraph
Article Date: Sep 12, 2000
Car Accociations: NEW_MINI,
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