Is The MINI A Mini Or An Imposter?

In 1959, the Mini was launched and took the whole world by storm. With its transverse engine and front wheel drive layout, creating disproportionate amounts of passenger space, combined with excellent road handling, the car became a British cultural icon and rally hero of the sixties.

The car influenced a whole generation of car designers and was voted the second most influential car of the 20th century, after the Ford Model T, as much for its social impact as its cultural one. It was a car that acted as a social leveller.

Everybody who was somebody bought one. Ringo Starr, Peter Sellers, Paul McCartney and George Harrison, Steve McQueen, Mick Jagger, and even Enzo Ferrari, all had one. For maybe the first time, the ordinary man in the street could afford to buy and drive the very same car as his heroes. And somehow, the car never got old.

The Mini did suffer from under-development to a degree, most especially in its later years. That could have been due to a lack of financial resources, or maybe the Rover Group just didn’t want to quit a hit. However, its days were most certainly numbered. As time went on, the Mini’s successful road trip was one that many thought could not be repeated. They could not have been more wrong.

The roller coaster ride to success lasted until 2000, by which time it had achieved global sales of some 5,387,862. That is a sales figure any automobile manufacturer would sell his grandmother for.

When BMW came into the picture in 1996, having bought the Rover Group (which they later referred to as the English Patient) it would only be a matter of time until BMW bailed out of the ailing company, selling Rover for one English pound and taking the Mini concept and marque with them. That was one very smart move and BMW knew it long before others made that observation retrospectively.

In 2001, I visited the Motor Show in Birmingham and what I saw was an early sign that the BMW MINI was going to be an outrageous success. On entering the main exhibition hall, from a distance, I could see a very large crowd of eager visitors surrounding what turned out to be the all-new BMW MINI. That reaction told me that the successor to the original Mini was going to be every bit as successful as its forebear.

It amused me somewhat when a few years later, none other than the legendary Autocar motoring journalist Steve Cropley, referred to the BMW MINI as an unexpected sales success. It seems like Steve didn’t see the clamouring crowd I saw in Birmingham. For me, it was clear the car was going to be every bit as successful as the original Mini. Whereas the original sold 5.3 million cars, the BMW MINI has sold 5.1 million!

Not for the first time Steve got it wrong. In the lead-up to the 2009 recession, when the big three car manufacturers in the USA were heading for the rocks, Steve claimed that the first to go bankrupt would be Ford. Ford was the only one who did not go to the wall and file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy overnight.

As for the BMW MINI, the only question that remains is can we call it a Mini when it is bigger than a Range Rover? I think not. However, we have to remember that for BMW the MINI is a brand as much as it is a car, and for that reason, whilst it does show stylistic pretensions to be on par with the original Mini, in so many other ways, it is a completely different model.

No doubt, the modern generation of BMW MINI aficionados that never knew the original Mini, will tell us old-timer, dyed-in-the-wool fans of the iconic original, “Suck it up Princess, it is what it is.”