Does Mini’s SUV prove bigger is always better?
The latest Countryman is a maxi Mini battling an identity crisis.
Only your closest friends will tell you that your breath smells like dog food, but you don’t have to look that far if you need someone to tell you you’ve put on weight. Personally, I don’t have to look past my beloved wife (her metabolism means she’d have to strap dumbbells to her shoes to put on weight), who has dozens of spikily subtle ways of larding it over me.
It can be as arch as an eyebrow-raise or a polite little retching sound when I frolic into the bedroom naked, or, in public, as pointed as a “do you need that extra Twinkie?”
Other people say it unintentionally with their faces. I well recall returning from London with a solid Heathrow Injection around my middle, and the way people would sharply gasp and make donut shapes with their mouths when they first saw my stomach arriving in a room before me.
I saw a lot of those same faces this week while driving the Countryman, which is allegedly a Mini but seems to be battling an identity crisis by eating dozens of cheesecakes.
Minis are, by definition, small, and every time I saw a proper one on the road while driving the vast and voluminous Countryman the owners would look at me like I’d just eaten a British bulldog in front of them.
Personally, this car makes no sense to me – it’s like M&Ms announcing that each of its tempting pieces of chocolate will now be the size of a Wagon Wheel. And yet I did find this car hugely amusing, and intriguing, because there’s just so much going on design-wise.
The third spoke of the steering wheel is not solid, it’s like a taut piece of seatbelt. The door linings, and most of the things you touch in the cabin, are as colourful to feel as they are to look at (it seems like the Mini designers want you to know just how hard they’re trying, even if your eyes are closed). And the Circular OLED Central Instrument Display is the size of a Lazy Susan, and so bright that you can still see it inside your eyelids when you’re in bed at night.
This screen is capable of all kinds of wondrous things – at one stage a gorgeous animated guinea pig threw itself at me, before announcing it was temporarily unavailable – particularly when you flick the “Experiences” toggle switch, which allows you to select between “Vivid”, “Green”, “Core” and “Go Kart” themes (the last of which is announced with a bass boom and a voice shouting “Woohoo!”).
The wondrous ability to feel and drive like a go-kart is, of course, what has long defined the Mini brand, and the reason I’ve long loved its cars. The Countryman looks more like a very confused SUV (it’s built on the same platform as the BMW X1) and yet, thanks to the kind of clever engineering we should expect from the brand’s parent company, BMW, this Maxi Mini does provide some simulacrum of go-kart magic, at least through its steering. You expect the Countryman to be cumbersome on the road, but somehow it darts around with the kind of hyper-puppy bum-sniffing energy of a proper Mini.
What’s missing in the case of the model I drove – the Countryman All4 Favoured – is performance, with its 2.0-litre, four-cylinder engine making just 150kW and 300Nm, and taking 7.4 seconds to eke its way to 100km/h. The car pumps various amounts of fake Mini noises into the cabin depending on what Experience you’ve selected, but what you are not allowed to do is select the gear you want the vehicle’s seven-speed automatic to be in.
I have always insisted that an automatic Mini is like a self-playing piano – nice to look at, but embarrassingly uninvolving. Minis are made to be manuals, and yet this Countryman doesn’t even play pretend: there aren’t even any shift paddles behind the steering wheel, and the gearshift is a toggle embedded in the dash.
This lack of connection between car and driver really irked me, but I’m guessing that it matters not to your standard Countryman buyer, who I imagine as the kind of person who used to own a proper Mini, made the mistake of agreeing to have children and now refuses to engage with that reality by buying a proper parent car like a Camry.
What did shock me, and might explain just how well the Countryman actually sells, was the price of this attractively specified version (I did enjoy the heated and massage-capable seats, and the heated steering wheel), which is listed as just $61,990.
Sure, the Countryman does provide sniffs of the brand ethos that once attracted people to proper, punchy go-kart Minis, but in essence it’s really just an SUV. Or a Mini that ate all the pies. And all the apple pies.
Mini Countryman
Engine: 2.0-litre four-cylinder (150kW, 300Nm)
Fuel economy: 7.6 litres per 100km
Transmission: Seven-speed automatic, front-wheel drive
Price: $61,990
Rating: 2.5/5
