MINI Cooper C

• Report 1: We welcome the latest MINI Cooper to our long term fleet
• Report 2: First driving impressions of the new MINI Cooper.
• Report 3: Twenty minutes tinkering in a lay-by.
• Report 4: The Missus has her say. Obviously.

Report 1: We welcome the latest MINI Cooper to our long term fleet

The latest generation of the MINI brings some key changes. So how does this compare to the outgoing version?

Date: 16 July 2024 | Current mileage: 810 | Claimed economy: 47.1mpg | Actual economy: 44.3mpg

It’s hard not to love a Mini when the first car in which you travelled at over 100mph was a Cooper S. Goggle-eyes glued to the giant wok of a speedometer as – twin-carburettor-sponsored frenzy from the engine room too loud for speech - the needle crept inexorably towards that magic mark…

Cunningly deployed just a year after the final demise of the classic Mini and artfully proportioned to successfully disguise the substantial 2-feet 8-inches in length and 8.5-inches in width by which it instantly grew, BMW’s MINI skilfully tapped into the national passion for the original and it was an instant hit.

Not least because, despite having fed it all the pies, BMW spent so much money ensuring the car still handled and entertained in a manner befitting a Monte Carlo rally-conquering brand that sales profit was only to be found in the options list and servicing.

Today, four generations on, the story remains much the same, with one or two notable differences. Rather than an indication of performance tweaks luring within the engine room, Cooper is now the new model name of the three-door hatchback. Shame, really, but if BMW and Mercedes can do the same thing by turning their M and AMG badges into trim levels, we should not, I guess, be surprised.

Externally, design changes are not massive. There’s a new octagonal grille, chrome has been ditched for ecological reasons and the new rear lights give you a switchable choice of three Union Jack designs. Changes to the interior, however, are more radical.

Even more switchgear has bitten the dust, the wok-sized, 9.4-inch OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) touchscreen is finally fully circular, rather than a square display wedged into a circle. And there are more recycled materials including a woollen dashboard, which looks really smart until a toddler throws up all over it. How do you clean that up?

Leaving aside the MINI Cooper Electric two petrol models based on the old car’s underpinnings – the Cooper C and Cooper S - make up the entire new MINI Cooper range. The Cooper C we’ll be driving for the next six months uses a three-cylinder, 1.5 litre engine good for 154PS and 230Nm of torque. The Sportier Cooper S boasts a four-cylinder, 2.0 litre unit producing 204PS and 300Nm. Both engines get an eight speed transmission.

The bad news is that there’s no sign of a gearstick anywhere in the range. The closest you can get to manual is flappy paddles, which are only available with the slightly racier gearbox of the Sport trim level Cooper S.  This, considering we’ve been promised ‘iconic go-kart handling’, merits a massive, resounding raspberry.

One thing that certainly hasn’t changed is the capacity of the new MINI Cooper’s price to skyrocket as you climb through the trim levels and plunder the option packs. Both Coopers C and S are available in a choice of three trim levels - Classic, Exclusive and Sport. In addition, there are three option packs – Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3, via which you may further pile on the toys. 

We’ll go into more detail about all this piggy bank-smashing stuff at a later date. For now, however, suffice it to say you can have a MINI Cooper C for as little as £22,300, but our car costs £24,500 in Exclusive trim, plus another £4000 for the Level 2 options pack, plus another £550 for black paint. 

Suddenly, that’s over £29,000. You can buy an awful lot of Audi A1, VW Polo, Skoda Fabia or Honda Jazz for that sort of dosh, or even – if we’re talking entertainment – a Mazda MX-5. So let’s hope that, at the very least, this new MINI Cooper turns out to be fun. Watch this space…

Report 2: First driving impressions of the new MINI Cooper.

We've covered some big miles in our first few weeks with the MINI Cooper C which has given us time to find out the good and bad so far.

Date: 2 August 2024 | Current mileage: 1757 miles | Claimed economy: 47.1mpg | Actual economy: 43.4mpg

We’ve somewhat spanked the map since the MINI Cooper arrived and have clocked up almost 1000 miles in a fortnight. More than enough to give you our initial driving impressions of the car…

Keyless entry is part of the £4000 Level 2 option pack fitted to this car, so a grab of the door handle unfurls the door mirrors and lets you in. But despite that gently hefty on-cost, electric seat adjustment is nowhere to be found. So it’s a good job that - with the notable exception of a clunky little lever in lieu of a proper turny knob to sort the seat back rake out – a fine driving position isn’t too much faff and three-lever fiddle away. 

Unfortunately, though, your reporter’s missus is somewhat less hastily constructed than him, so - despite pleas for her to adjust the seat slider only on occupation - he still has to readjust all three variables when retaking possession. First world problems, eh?

The Sports steering wheel that accompanies Exclusive grade is, however, a disaster. Those of us who learned to drive holding the helm at ten to two are greeted by a pair of Bingo wings sufficiently bulbous to pass muster in any Mecca hall the land over, which force your hands down to a quarter to three in the quest for any semblance of comfort. Irritating.

The wheel is the first point of contact when a driver occupies his office and ergonomic inadequacy provided by same is a cardinal sin. Especially if it continues to irk on the move. Which it does…

Keyless entry, yes, but only half keyless start, because what looks like the head of a key sticks out of the small panel beneath the wok-sized infotainment screen. You can twist it either way to both start and stop the engine, which is a tad odd.

Boasting 500cc per cylinder, the 1.5 litre engine doesn’t thrum in the manner of small three-pots and is pretty smooth and quiet at idle. You’ll want to turn off the auto stop function, though, because the engine is both slow and B-movie shuddery in coming back to life - not much help with hasty junction exits.

The Cooper steps smartly off the line and, via a nicely oleaginous eight-speed automatic gearbox, a quoted 0-62mph time of 7.7 seconds feels just about sprightly enough for a car with Cooper badging. However, all our early misgivings about the absence of a manual gear change landed like an anvil on Wile E. Coyote’s foot within the first few miles…

MINI brochure-brags about the car’s ‘iconic go-kart handling’ and initial impressions would suggest rightly so. This is a clearly expensive suspension set-up - the ride may be firm but it’s always supple, only really falling foul of the worst surfaces at urban speeds, when it can feel as if each wheel has been replaced by a frog in a sock.

The relatively short wheelbase dictates that the MINI’s penchant for hip-hop never entirely dissipates, but the ride smooths out incrementally as speeds grow, leaving you free to concentrate on exploiting a bucket-full of agility. If only. The automatic ‘box won’t be hurried and offers remarkably little engine braking when you lift off the throttle, so you find yourself relying entirely on the brakes to slow for a corner. And thereafter relying entirely on grip until the throttle and gearbox combo finally respond to your demand for more power in a lower gear.

Ah well… At motorway speeds the MINI Cooper feels remarkably composed. Velocity seems to iron out many of the road surface lumps and bumps that set the occupants jostling in their seats at a slower pace while the car settles into a pleasingly mature cruise. We’ve been seeing over 43mpg on average thus far, which doesn’t seem that great for a small car, but certainly reflects how urgently the Cooper encourages you to drive it hard…

However, take way the stick and there’s no question - you take away the fun. If only you could be in charge of selecting which gear you want and when, we reckon this car would be an absolute hoot to drive.

Presumably most MINI buyers want the style and don’t care so much about the entertainment potential, and there’s no doubt we’re being prepared for the age of the EV MINI through the introduction of auto transmission here. Anyway, you’ll need a minimum of £30,200 to get flappy paddles courtesy of the Cooper S Sport – the closest you can now get to access all areas when it comes to entertainment….

Give it a six speed manual transmission and a thinner rimmed, knobble-free alcantara clad steering wheel, and we reckon the fuel consumption figures would never get above… Oh, 35mpg? 

Report 3: Twenty minutes tinkering in a lay-by.

You can't not notice the MINI Cooper C's dashboard-dominating circular touchscreen but its generating frustrations as enormous as it is.

Date: 23 August 2024 | Current mileage: 2675 | Claimed economy: 47.1mpg | Actual economy: 43.5mpg

It’s always the same, isn’t it? You climb into a new car, start the engine, put on the seatbelt and off you go. Only to realise with the advent of the very first corner that the ruddy lane-keeping assistant just has to go. And the vibrating steering wheel. And the auto stop/start. And the bonging speed limit warning…

And then it strikes you — while almost administering a punt up the luggage to the car in front as you focus on that tarmac-jostled finger which fails again and again to prod the right infotainment screen icon — that you’d better pull into a lay-by and see what else needs switching off, or on, or otherwise needs attention.

It took me a week to discover that one of the buttons below the infotainment screen takes you directly to the vehicle settings menu, which means two less stabs of the screen. Either way, it’s then a doddle to disconnect the lane-keeper, speed limit alarm and annoyingly slow and jerky auto stop/start function.

Two jabs are required to kill the lane assistant, the second to confirm you’re sure. Seriously..? Taking the vibration out of the helm is harder, because there isn’t actually an ‘off’ setting, and bizarrely, even with all the nannies obliterated, it’ll still give the occasional unsolicited tremor. I haven’t yet found out why.

Connecting the phone’s no problem — the usual confirmatory digit-dance between car and mobile screens. But I refuse to allow Apple CarPlay to fire up, because once it’s done so you just can’t get rid of the damned thing. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the MINI’s navigation system or screen visuals.

Next we come to the MINI Experiences toggle switch, which turns out to be a scroll through seven choices of screen and ambient lighting design:

• Go-Kart — sports a black and white dial with red needles and ambient lighting — it introduces itself with a ‘Woo-Hoo’.
• Core — the default setting with a pleasant blue background.
• Eco — green, of course.
• Vivid — bright red with matching ambient lighting.
• Timeless — a magnolia background and an old-fashioned typeface, exactly like the dials on a Rover 75 after BMW decided the original design wasn’t sufficiently Classic-British-Saloon enough.
• Balance — like Core with a darker, more subdued blue ambient lighting.
• Personal — wherein you can use one of your own photos as the screen background. Selfie heaven.

In each case you can have a whole-screen analogue style speedometer or opt for a digital readout at the top and a choice of what you see through the round window in the middle.

You also have three different choices of front and rear daytime-running light design. Some will consider it a blessing that, despite the promise of Union Jack in the rear lamp casing design, not one of the choices comes close to the blatant flag motif of this car’s predecessor.

Finally, then, we come to MINI ID. I’m not at all sure what this can do for you, since the tutorial I Googled featured a woman who smiled a great deal while connecting-up via her mobile, yet actually told me nothing.

What I do know is that it’ll save my preferred temperature setting, radio station and head-up display choices which, after my missus has been in the car with her predilection for arctic gales and Radio 1, is useful indeed.

Well… After ten minutes of email addresses and passwords I reached a stage where the screen just kept taking me back to the previous step (happens all the time in my world), so with no hope of further forward progress I gave up. Trouble is, by this stage the system had set the car up for the previous ID’s preferences — steaming hot and head-up display on — from which it took me another five minutes to escape. Entirely by accident I might add. I’m back as a Guest now on the system, and likely to remain that way.

In Fairness to MINI, twenty-odd minutes isn’t all that much time to set up your car by today’s standards, but don’t expect to get any help from the internet. Clearly MINI likes to think of the car much as Apple thinks of its iPhone — it’s all completely intuitive so you don’t need instructions. Until it suddenly isn’t, and you do.

So you learn a new feature every six months from a succession of complete strangers who themselves learned in the same way from someone else. Who was probably a pre-teen.

Report 4: The Missus has her say. Obviously.

Date: 11 September 2024 | Current mileage: 3381 | Claimed economy: 47.1mpg | Actual economy: 44.5mpg

Mercifully, the missus rather likes the MINI, unlike the Evil Smelling Dog, which (hoorah!) won’t fit in the diminutive boot. Or the two now fully grown hooligans, who are both well over six-feet tall and can barely access the back seats, let alone get comfortable therein.

The missus is entirely happy bumbling about in an automatic, so doesn’t miss a manual gear lever in the slightest. But that’s not to say she’s totally won over by the engine-gearbox combo. At crawling speeds she finds the accelerator all too eager to jump from creep to career at the slightest touch, making parking an even more haphazard affair than it ever was.

Conversely, out on the road, she frowns at the gearbox’s somewhat lazy response to her right foot when it comes to delivering overtaking power to match a gap in the traffic. I’m with her on this — if ever a drive mode selector with a Sport option was required, or even flappy paddles to speed-up the process, it’s here. As it is, lead-footing the throttle feels very much like stamping on the tail of a brontosaurus — you have to wait quite a while before the other end goes ‘ouch..!’.

On the infotainment front, the missus prefers to wirelessly connect Apple CarPlay than use what the MINI already has to offer, the latter with which I am more than happy. Trouble is, once CarPlay gets its hands on the system, it’s almost impossible to make it let go again.

If we’re in the car together, her phone and Apple immediately hold sway. And even though she’s considerably more tech-savvy that I, the only way she can give me the Mini’s infotainment system back is to totally disconnect her phone, which, as you can imagine, involves a deal of attendant harrumphing. We’ve found no other way of achieving this, either on touch screen or phone — it really is a pain.

Happily (and largely because they all come up on the same screen), she has now mastered the art of switching off the lane-keeping assistant, the annoying speed limit warning bong, and even the auto stop/start system, which takes so long to shudder back into life that she has contemplated permanently installing an emergency duvet in the MINI to ease time spent at particularly busy junctions.

Like me, the missus is no fan of the head-up display, the glass of which is so heavily tinted that looking through the windscreen with it raised feels very much akin to wearing a pair of dark glasses with one lens missing. Anyway, the digital speedo at the top of the wok-sized central screen is writ so large you can easily read it out of the corner of an eye.

Other than these smallish issues, she’s happy as a sandboy behind the wheel. I get the feeling that MINIs are something of a status symbol for women these days and are thicker on the ground than ticks on a sheepdog in this part of Mudfordshire.

Happy wife, happy life, as the saying goes.