   2014 Mini Cooper to Olympic Peninsula. Click image to enlarge |
Review and photos by Brendan McAleer
Have you ever tried to strap a toddler into a car seat that they don’t want to get into? It’s like trying to buckle up a knot of eels – alternatively galvanized into board-like stiffness or boneless slumping, flinging their head around and wailing. Oh, and mucus. Mucus as far as the eye can see. All of the mucus.
Your average parent soon develops the hand-eye coordination of a Vishnu/Shiva, and a certain tendency to use words like “non-negotiable.” The terrible twos approach, a snotty, tantrum-throwing end to the golden age of infancy. So anyway, let’s cram this little terrorist into a Mini.
Previous multi-day family road trips have been in crossovers like the Santa Fe XL or minivans like the Honda Odyssey. Basically, there’s so much room in those machines, it’s pretty much cheating. You don’t need to pack carefully, you just fling it all in there, with enough room left over to pick up a Cozy Coupe along the way.
With the Cooper, well, good thing I played so much Tetris as a kid. If this was the lone ride for a single-car urban family, then fitting all the necessary gear plus a child seat would be a challenge of the highest order. Honey, maybe the Mini has to go – what about that Countryman thingy?
No. Stop. When I was a kid, my folks raised two boys with a Land Rover and an old 5 Series. My grandfather, patriarch of a family of seven, had a Daf 600 sedan. In Europe, family cars are little fuel-efficient hatchbacks like this, and you don’t need to buy a tank as soon as junior comes along, particularly if you live in a very walkable city.
Moreover, everything fits. The new Mini Cooper is up in its dimensions slightly, with a longer wheelbase adding in a little more rear seat room. Our gargantuan Diono child seat bolts right in, and the trunk is big enough to swallow the bulk of the luggage at nearly 250 L in capacity. We hopped on AirBnB, booked a series of places to stay throughout Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, packed the minimum we could get away with, and headed south of the border.
While editors Jonathan and Jacob seem to love the new Cooper S, giving it a win over the fantastic Fiesta ST, I’m more lukewarm on the car. Its engine is too big (and strangely doesn’t make enough power), it’s too aggressive in its looks – it feels like it’s trying just a bit too hard. Stepping into this plain black base Cooper, fitted with an automatic transmission, I expected to have a similar experience. Fun to drive, sure, but a less-engaging steer than previous Minis, albeit with a nicer interior.
After a droning highway drive and a slightly Guantanamo-ish border guard, we hopped off the interstate, and scooted for Chuckanut Drive. Here, on a curvy mountainside road, the Mini set the tone for the trip. It was utterly fantastic.
Underneath that truncated bonnet is a turbocharged 1.5L three-cylinder engine that cranks out 134 hp from 4,500–6000-rpm, and 162 lb-ft from 1,250 rpm. Fire it up in the morning and it grumbles to life with an offbeat rumble; stir up the boost and it whistles and whooshes and burbles like a kettle coming on the boil. Time for a strong cuppa.
   2014 Mini Cooper to Olympic Peninsula. Click image to enlarge |
Even with the six-speed automatic, which lacks paddle-shifters and has a lurching third to second engagement, this little dynamo of an engine makes the Mini drive more like a Mini than its fancier big brother. It’s got just enough power to be engaging, and the readily accessible torque makes it feel quicker than it is. This may be a more BMW-y Mini than ever before, but on the wriggling Chuckanut, it’s got plenty of that just-the-essentials driving style of the original. Bombing along with the massive sunroof open (and the screen closed to protect my pasty Emerald Isle complexion), the Cooper hustled along the coastline with just fingertip control.
 2014 Mini Cooper to Olympic Peninsula. Click image to enlarge |
On our first night, we stayed in a treehouse. Having unloaded the various bags and freed my daughter to romp about the lawn, I was dispatched for a quick supply run, which entailed about two miles or so of country road. Sport mode on. Traction control set to loose.
Your average modern car is so competent these days that driving one in a way that feels like you’re pushing it usually involves antisocial speeds. Not so with the Cooper, which spun up its little three-pot and scooted over to the grocery store parking lot to make friends with a tractor-trailer. This particular car was fitted with the optional $500 dynamic damper control, and while the ride was fairly bumpy over some of the broken pavement, it made a mundane quick trip something of a rally stage. Mini’s “go-kart” marketing is just that – marketing – especially with the new car’s slightly higher seating position, but the Cooper still feels compact and nimble. While it didn’t quite have the grip that the performance rubber and larger wheels gave the Cooper S, it hustled just fine.
The next day, after a restful treetop evening, we murdered a bird. With a loud “pock!” a little brown finch bounced off the windshield of the Mini and I could see in my rearview that it now was, metaphorically speaking, an ex-parrot. Ugh. I felt horrible for at least an hour, even as the spectacular Olympic peninsular scenery unfolded in front of our stubby windscreen.
The Mini’s retro design has imparted a few visual quirks, and surprising blind spots. Park at a traffic light, and you’ll sometimes lose the light to the low roof, leaving you craning forward to watch for a green. With the car seat installed, I had a massive three-quarter blind area, but a simple tweak of the side mirrors helped out. The rear window is pretty small too.
   2014 Mini Cooper to Olympic Peninsula. Click image to enlarge |
However, the forward area of greenhouse and the large panoramic roof gave this little car an airy feel, ideal for touring. Weirdly, the speedometer has no miles-per-hour markings, only metric, so as I did the mental arithmetic on 40 mph, my wife and daughter had a good look at the shimmering coastline. We popped onto a little local ferry, and plowed through the fog over to Port Townsend. Here, I managed to get lost in a boatyard, but we eventually got out of town, stopping for lunch in a nondescript roadside cafe where I was served a sandwich the size of an aircraft carrier.
The next morning, I woke early and went and had tea on the deck of our little cabin, watching a doe crop grass a few feet from the Cooper. People always talk about little cars like this as city cars, but the Mini looked somehow right taken away from the shiny shop fronts and busy streets of Vancouver. Sure, there’s an element of fashion accessory to it, but I figure with a stick shift, maybe in green, it’d make for a great getaway car. It could be your commuter too, but if you used transit to get to work and kept this thing in your parking garage with pleasure insurance only, it’s an ideal long-weekend escape pod.
   2014 Mini Cooper to Olympic Peninsula. Click image to enlarge |
And then it killed again. This time, a squirrel fell victim to our inexplicably bloodthirsty Cooper, who was obviously a cat in its previous life, and again I moped around with a hangdog look for half the day. Still, an early morning hike and a drive on a country lane with signs like Road Narrows and Winding Road For Five Miles cheered me up immeasurably.
At the end of our four-day trip, I dropped wife and kid off at the train station, and headed southwards to the LeMay museum, a place I’d visited before in a vehicle with considerably more oomph. However, by the standard of the cars I surrounded myself with there, it was the Mini which was now the behemoth.
It was the Great Pacific Northwest Microcar Minicar Extravaganza – long name, short cars. In the 1950s, with gas rationing and high fuel prices in Europe, the general population was mobilized with tiny little toon-town cars, many running two-stroke engines. Here could be found the genesis of the original Mini, with BMC’s Sir Leonard Lord saying, “God damn these bloody awful bubble cars!” and demanding the development of the tiny, capacious cult classic.
As a modern car, the Cooper looked more than a little out of place, but when attendees learned that it had a wacky three-cylinder engine, they perked up a little. Soon, we were one of the crowd, with the Mini’s gutsy engine providing enough punch to whoosh past the Messerschmitts and Subaru 360s on short sections, leapfrogging ahead to grab a picture or two.
And then, on the final four-hour leg, I simply hooked up my iPhone, set the cruise control at 1.6 x the mph speed limit, flicked the gearshift toggle to green, and listened to the Bugle satirize various Britishy things as I bombed back North in my distinctly Bavarian Cooper. The ride was taut, with a bit of wind noise from that upright windscreen, but the drive was otherwise essentially effortless. Observed fuel economy for the trip was right around 7.0 L/100 km – not bad, though premium was required.
So, apart from being slightly murdery in the small animal department, the Cooper utterly charmed. Frankly, the only real concerns here are related to long-term reliability – or rather, a history of not having much – but with the bulk of these little cars being leased over a period where warranty coverage combines with free servicing, it’s certainly a car I can recommend. Well, the options pricing does stick in the craw a bit. $590 for metallic paint on a $20K car? Gadzooks.
But unlike the toddler, no major tantrums: just a small car with a spirited, grumbly engine, and a nimble, entertaining drive. Get the options right, and it’s the star of the Mini range, simply because it does the most with the least.
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Pricing: 2014 Mini Cooper
Base Price (Cooper): $20,900
Options: $4,840 (Loaded Package [keyless access, sport seats, automatic climate control] – $2100; automatic transmission – $1400; metallic paint – $590; dynamic damper – $500; anthracite roofliner – $250 )
Freight: $1655
A/C Tax: $100
Price as Tested: $27,795
Competitors:
Chevrolet Sonic
Fiat 500 Turbo
Ford Fiesta
Honda Fit
Hyundai Accent
Kia Rio
Mazda2
Toyota Yaris
Volkswagen Golf
Crash Test Results:
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)
Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS)
