Mini Hatch Cooper SE electric review: Mini-meh
The cute classic goes electric – and loses some of its magic.
I’m trying to think of something I despise as much as emoticons – the haughty English cricket team, bilious Brussels sprouts, reality TV, cyclists – but I really can’t. I accept, and even relish, the fact that the English language is constantly evolving, regurgitating and reinventing words, but to me the emoticon feels like a full stop, the end of writing itself, a conscious choice of unforgivable laziness represented by sending someone a picture of a laughing turd rather than a considered quip.
My family knows not to rile me with them, but this does not stop my children from finding daring new ways to provoke the same outraged response. They use the verbal equivalent of emoticons, such as responding to my question “How was your day?” with “Meh”. Worse still, my teen son now insists on describing things – parties, movies, food, life itself – with the term “mid”, which apparently is a youthful new version of “meh” and implies that something is neither here nor there, nor worthy of descriptive English.
I bemoan this term’s non-committalness, so you can imagine his delight when the new electric Mini I was excited about driving offered up not only two Green modes, but a Sport and a “Mid” setting as well.
Normally, I decline to engage with any mode marked “Green” or “Eco”, because I see them as faintly ridiculous, although it does make me chortle to think of someone trying to sell their benefits to a buyer (“Yep, it’s got this button here that makes it less fun to drive – fantastic, huh?”). Increasingly, in the case of EVs, however, they are a feature you might actually use, to save on power and increase range, particularly if you live in Australia and your next charger might be as far away as the nearest star.
Some modern electric vehicles with a motor on each axle even offer you the option to turn one of them off, reducing excitement but instantly improving range. This is something you definitely need to think about with this Mini because, as a famously tiny car, it has also been fitted with a suitably tiddling 32.6kWh battery, which means it offers a theoretical range of just 222km between charges.
As such, I felt compelled to at least try the “Green” setting, because I wasn’t about to give my son the satisfaction of driving something “Mid” and I couldn’t just use Sport all the time (well I could, but it wouldn’t be very journalistically thorough). As for the more extreme Green+, I was afraid to press it for fear it would shut the car down and force me to walk.
Now, I should point out that I have always loved Minis, and if they were about 80 per cent cheaper I might have even bought one by now. There’s just something about their tiny wheelbase and punchy personalities that I adore, and that combination genuinely does deliver on the brand’s core promise of “go-kart handling”. For maximum enjoyment, however, a Mini must be fitted with a manual gearbox, because only then can you fully engage with the joy of wringing its little neck while giggling to yourself. It’s a car that makes you smile, even when you’re just looking at it.
The Mini Hatch Cooper SE, however, gets truly awful wheels that are meant to look funky and modern but are worse than “mid”. And, being an EV, it can’t be a manual, which means a lot of the involvement is missing – but happily not all of it. Even in Green mode, the typical torquiness of an electric power train makes it thrusty and all of the ground-kissing, short, sharp handling is available.
It also feels a lot quicker than its claimed 7.3-second 0-to-100km/h time suggests, but perhaps that’s just because you’re sitting so close to the road and the front of the car feels about three inches away.
I struggled slightly to enjoy this Mini, however, as it was our only family car for the week and the amount of whining over who got to sit in the front and who had to hold their breath and massage their disjointed knees in the back was almost deafening (at one stage I feared they might play the famous “I call shotgun” game with actual firearms). This also meant I often had to drive like an old person, with my knees in my armpits and my chin on the steering wheel.
Clearly, the Mini Hatch Cooper SE is for childless people – who I’ve noticed have enough money to pay $55,650 for something this small and toy-like – and for those who don’t often need to drive very far. In fact, with its laughably small range, I’d argue that it is pretty much a second-car proposition only for most households.
It almost, but not quite, goes without saying that you could get much bigger EVs, with double the range between charges, for very close to the same money.
When I asked my resident teen what he thought of the Mini EV at week’s end, he paused, smiled and then drove me right over to distraction with the words, “it’s aight” (for traditional English speakers, this is a poor man’s portmanteau of “all right” for people too lazy to say both words). Please, someone, kill me now.
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Mini Hatch Cooper SE Classic