From the July 2002 issue of Car and Driver.
Here’s some advice: Don’t buy a Mini Cooper unless you own an enclosed, lockable garage. Otherwise, you’ll get to talk to your neighbors until 11 o’clock at night. They’ll come aknocking, begging rides, trailing kids with disposable diapers and disposable cameras. And during those rides, other travelers will shout questions at you. From their moving cars.
It’s a little hard to fathom this frenzy. The Mini was last sold here in 1967, an object of giddy derision that turned its fair share of Americans off British cars for three decades. Now it’s back—24 inches longer, 11 inches wider, 1100 pounds heavier—and turning heads as reliably as the New Beetle and the PT Cruiser.
Like Tiger Woods’s, the car’s genealogy is beguiling. Fifty-five percent of its parts are from Great Britain, 15 percent from Germany. Its Chrysler/BMW joint-venture Pentagon engine is from Brazil. Final assembly is in Oxford, England, at a plant famous for its Rovers. And the car is sold in America through 56 “BMW Group” dealers.
There are two Mini flavors. The standard Cooper, with a base price of only $16,850, is powered by a 16-valve 1.6-liter four-banger producing 115 horsepower. The Cooper S fetches an extra $3000 but is supercharged and intercooled, producing 163 horses funneled through a Getrag six-speed. It’s simple to tell the two apart. The S is the one with the Royal Mail slot in its snout.
Despite the low base prices, assembly is superb, sometimes jewel-like. Check out the delicately curved side-marker lights molded into the leading and trailing edges of the fender flares, and the quarter-window glass that wraps seductively around the C-pillars. This is, of course, a small automobile—almost 31 inches shorter than a Honda Civic Coupe—but its cockpit is less claustrophobic than you’d think, in part because of terrific headroom. The rear seat is awkward to climb into but can nonetheless accommodate two adults, as long as the front chairs are scooched into their first third of travel. Behind the rear seat is a 5.3-cubic-foot cargo niche that will accept four upright grocery bags and one day’s worth of mail. When the rear seats are flattened, the cargo area swells to 23.7 cubic feet. Its usable dimensions are roughly 33 inches wide by 43 deep by 24 high.
The interior resembles something Picasso might have conjured on a wine-enlivened Saturday night. It is awash in art-deco spaceship bits—silver-plastic swirls and eddies and curlicues that are cold and hard to the touch. Whether this works aesthetically is your call, not ours, but the stylists’ flight of fancy occasionally undermine function. The pointy “egg pod” ends of the turn-signal and wiper stalks, for instance, shed your fingertips. The shift knob is leather, chrome, and see-through plastic—three surfaces, three temperatures—and is as large as a cue ball, suiting only Governor Ventura’s grip. The door latches reside within their own plastic spheroids and are hard to find. The springloaded toggles in the center stack—two of them for the electric windows—are fussy to locate by touch alone. The top third of the tach is obscured by a steering wheel so thick that it cramped our thumbs after two laps around our handling loop. And the tiny buttons for the horn are impossibly small. At one point, a row of eight Miatas passed the other way, each honking and flashing. We located the Mini’s horn only as Miata No. 8 passed by.
What you notice first about driving the Mini is that its electrohydraulic speed-sensitive steering is heavy. It’s also very quick. You don’t often find those traits in the same bed. It’ll cause you to hit apexes too early for the first few days, and a strong sneeze on the freeway can land you in a new lane. Tracking is otherwise good for a car with a 97.1-inch wheelbase. Not so the turning circle, which exceeds a Honda CR-V’s. As if to match the steering, the clutch and shift linkages are also relatively high-effort devices. The accelerator pedal is adequately positioned for heel-and-toeing, but it emits a nasty metal-to-metal clack every time it meets the fire wall.
Those heavy secondary controls aren’t so much disappointing as surprising. We expected the light, airy reflexes of, say, a Civic Si. The Cooper S perpetually feels porkier than its 2767 pounds suggest. After 10 minutes of driving, you’ll forget you’re in a small car. That’s fine, but at urban speeds the heft begins to translate as a kind of slow-wittedness, notably in traffic. BMW, which owns the company, may well have induced this Teutonicity on purpose, fearful of Yanks who’d reject a Lilliputian runabout unless it felt dense, substantial, able to fend off SUVs.
The supercharged Pentagon is satisfactorily smooth at idle and emits a palatable yowl. It is quicker to build revs than its naturally aspirated stablemate (see Mini Cooper review below) noticeable when you blip the throttle for downshifts. Neither engine, however, offers particularly quick throttle response. With its pulses somewhat subdued by the Roots blower, the S’s motor is also less thrashy, especially above 5000 rpm. Below two grand, there’s not much workable 00mph, and achieving smooth step-off requires more clutch slipping than we’d prefer. A banzai clutch drop rewards you with 10 easy feet of wheelspin, followed by a nice Pomeranian’s bark at the upshift. Sixty mph is in your face at 7.0 seconds—one second quicker than a Civic Si. The quarter-mile is history in 15.5 seconds at 90 mph—0.2 second and 4 mph behind a VW GTI 1.8T. The 128-mph top speed is seven shy of a Ford SVT Focus’s.
What the Mini does best is devour corners, thanks in part to its 3-series-style multilink rear suspension and spring rates that must be close to a Ferrari F40’s. On even the wildest kinks and whirligigs, there is simply no perceptible roll, dive, or squat. The car hangs on beyond what its grip of 0.85 g suggests. By the time you get the tires howling, your passenger will be dialing 9-1-1. Eventually, the Mini understeers, but on dry, public roads, you’ll have a deuce of a time inducing it.
Big surprise: The handling comes at the expense of ride. At best it’s choppy, at worst harsh, especially when the front wheels catch a frost heave simultaneously. Although the Mini can stop in 169 feet—sports-car territory—it is somewhat nervous and darty doing so on rough pavement, which, by the way, summons a hullabaloo of road noise up through the Pirellis’ run-flat sidewalls.
Our test car was loaded with $4150 of options, none of which increased its fun factor. The car you want is the $19,850 “base” S. Everything of consequence is standard: anti-lock brakes, traction control, 16-inch wheels that grip as well as the 17s, even a six-speaker stereo with a CD player. We expected the Mini to be flawless to behold. It is. We also expected it would be a small BMW. It isn’t. Neither is it an original Mini. It is to three-door hatchbacks what the Honda Insight is to econo-compacts—a different sort of driving experience, a new personality. Plus, any car that so deftly captures America’s attention and is so comprehensively anti-ute is a blow for freedom.
Mini Vanilla: Driving the Cooper S’s Lesser Stablemate
The plain-Jane Mini Cooper makes Jane look pretty good. Like its stablemate, the base car—at a truly appealing $16,850—includes more than the rudiments: ABS, central locking, sixway-adjustable seats, tire-pressure monitoring, A/C, even a CD player. Ours came fitted with the optional 16-inch Dunlops ($500), which delivered skidpad grip identical to the S’s, with slightly improved ride. With all that grip—and brakes just as effective as the S’s—we came to miss the thigh and rib bolsters standard in the upline car.
Mini vanilla comes with a manual five-speed Midlands Powertrain transmission, rather than the S’s six-speed Getrag. The difference is significant. The five-speed’s linkage is inappropriately heavy, and it’s easy to beat the synchro going into second. The third-to-second downshift is a deliberate, three-step affair, and there are ratio leaps that 115 horses are hard pressed to overcome.
Zero to 60 mph comes in 8.3 seconds and the quarter-mile in 16.6—in both cases, 0.1 second quicker than a Honda Civic EX Coupe. Not bad, but this naturally aspirated four feels more Rover than rabid—slower to rev than the blown variant, also noticeably thrashier beyond 5000 rpm. Combined with the Mini’s heavy controls, this plain Jane sometimes becomes Aunt Jane—less agile than she should be. You begin noticing that various low-life Sentras and GTIs and Integras are stealing the coveted holes in traffic, and if you aren’t relentless about hammering the throttle out of every turn, they’ll steal your lunch, too.
It’s easy for car critics to insist that readers lay out extra cash—in this case, the $3000 premium for the Cooper S. But this time, we’re walkin’ the walk. The silver Cooper S depicted in the man story is the property of our own assassin, B. Yates.
2002 Mini Cooper
115-hp inline-4, 5-speed manual, 2591 lb
Base/as-tested price: $16,850/$18,460
C/D TEST RESULTS
60 mph: 8.3 sec
1/4 mile: 16.6 sec @ 83 mph
100 mph: 28.7 sec
Braking, 70-0 mph: 170 ft
Roadholding, 300-ft-dia skidpad: 0.85 g
C/D observed fuel economy: 26 mpg
Specifications
Specifications
2002 Mini Cooper S
Vehicle Type: front-engine, front-wheel-drive, 2+2-passenger, 2-door hatchback
PRICE
Base/As Tested: $19,850/$24,000
Options: leather upholstery, $1 250; Premium package (includes sunroof, automatic climate control, onboard computer), $1 250; Sport package (includes dynamic stability control, 17-inch wheels, xenon headlamps), $1250; metallic paint, $400
ENGINE
supercharged and intercooled DOHC 16-valve inline-4, iron block and aluminum heads, port fuel injection
Displacement: 98 in3, 1598 cm3
Power: 163 hp @ 6000 rpm
Torque: 155 lb-ft @ 4000 rpm
TRANSMISSION
6-speed manual
CHASSIS
Suspension, F/R: control arms/trailing arms
Brakes, F/R: 10.9-in vented disc/10.2-in disc
Tires: Pirelli Euforia Run Flat RSC
205/45VR-17
DIMENSIONS
Wheelbase: 97.1 in
Length: 143.9 in
Width: 66.5 in
Height: 55.8 in
Passenger Volume, F/R: 47/30 ft3
Cargo Volume: 5 ft3
Curb Weight: 2767 lb
C/D TEST RESULTS
60 mph: 7.0 sec
1/4-Mile: 15.5 sec @ 90 mph
100 mph: 19.8 sec
120 mph: 37.5 sec
Rolling Start, 5–60 mph: 8.3 sec
Top Gear, 30–50 mph: 13.0 sec
Top Gear, 50–70 mph: 12.3 sec
Top Speed (drag ltd): 128 mph
Braking, 70–0 mph: 169 ft
Roadholding, 300-ft Skidpad: 0.85 g
C/D FUEL ECONOMY
Observed: 21 mpg
EPA FUEL ECONOMY
City/Highway: 24/33 mpg
C/D TESTING EXPLAINED
John Phillips first began writing about cars in 1974, at Car Weekly in Toronto. He later worked for Ford Racing, then served for seven years as the Executive Editor of Car and Driver. In the interim, he has written for Harper’s, Sports Illustrated, The Toronto Globe and Mail, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Conde Nast Traveler. He enjoyed a one-on-one interview with Joe Biden and is the author of the true-crime saga God Wants You to Roll and the memoir Four Miles West of Nowhere. In 2007 he won the Ken Purdy Award for journalism. He lives with his wife, Julie, in the Bitterroot Valley.