Giles Chapman - Mini : 60 years

GILES CHAPMAN

Throughout six decades, Minis have been some of the most charismatic cars you can buy. From a driving point of view, the experience has always been joyfulscintillating, evenwhether the power on offer is meager or mighty. A lot of people have to own a small car, but almost everyone who actively enjoys getting behind the wheel wants to own a Mini.

Minis are also controversial.

The original car was the brainchild of a single individual, Alec Issigonis, who had the opportunity to reshape mass motoring like few before or since. He mixed the forcefulness of Henry Ford and Andr Citron, the engineering standards of Ferdinand Porsche, and a boyish enthusiasm that P. G. Wodehouse would have been proud to create. His Mini was conceived in troubled times as a radical new minimum-standard for economy cars. Everything about it was daring.

The Mini went on, both by design and unexpected circumstance, to be a constant in Britains motoring scene for an incredible forty-one years. The last car made in 2000 really was very little different from the first one in 1959. Its survival throughout that time is an eye-opening story in itself.

Replacing the Mini with the MINI proved to be one of the hardest assignments any car manufacturer could undertake. BMW grabbed the mettle and chose to reincarnate the hard-charging Mini Cooper for the new millennium. The Anglo-German process was fraught, but the result was a compact car that stoked desire and pride in a new way while offering every safety, comfort, and convenience feature the twenty-first century consumer expects as a matter of course. Totally updated twice more since 2001, the MINI has retained its distinctiveness while blossoming into an entire range of cars.

Trying to write an overview of both the Mini and the MINI was never going to be easy. What I hope Ive achieved is an explanation of the why, the how, and the what of the two cars, as well as the way the why informs the how. I have friends and acquaintances who own both, and theres often tension because, although people who drive the modern cars have warm feelings for the originals, diehards of the 19592000 Mini rarely seem to like its successor. They feel its too bulky, too fancy, and has taken liberties with the minimalism that Issigonis espoused. Little you can say will change their minds, and such passion must be respected, and rather admired.

But there is no doubt that the 2001-on MINIs are excellent, and not least for the high-quality standards and enormous opportunity for personalization they offer. In common with the rest of the automotive world, the MINI is now entering its electric phase and beginning to sideline the internal combustion engine, which was all Issigonis understood about powering a car. While this will be a very different motoring era to the one he knew, any driver who loves cars with character must hope the MINI continues to maintain its very characterful place within it.

In 1986, TV presenter and all-around car nut Noel Edmonds (standing at door) was given the honor of driving the five millionth Mini off the production line.

CHAPTER

CARS FOR THE PEOPLE

OUT OF CRISIS AND CONTROVERSY, THE PLANETS WERE SUDDENLY ALIGNED, AND THE ENVIRONMENT WAS RIPE FOR AN ECONOMICAL NEW VEHICLE THAT ANYONE COULD ASPIRE TO.

Long, long before any speck of the Mini was even detectable in the mid-1950s, the quest for a convincing peoples car had propelled the motor car forward. Because, at first, it was little more than a volatile plaything for the ultrawealthya toy for Sunday-afternoon outings and, once engineers had learned how to harness power and roadholding, a mechanical racehorse to provide thrills for drivers and a spectacle for the crowds.

Making motoring an affordable right for every citizen was really the impetus behind German government thinking in the 1930s. The Volkswagen, or peoples car, was actually how the German Labor Front framed it in 1934. No matter how twisted and dastardly the regimes overall ethos, the Nazis car offering was irresistible to the man in the street then navigating on foot, bicycle, or motorbike. The Kraft durch Freude car was part of a project of the same name (translating to Strength through Joy) dedicated to making formerly middle-class pursuits such as holidays and travel available, and affordable, for everybody. Professor Ferdinand Porsche looked after the engineering of the rear-engined four-seater saloon, or cabriolet, designed to be foolproof equipment. Meanwhile, the Third Reich invented a groundbreaking installment-plan scheme allowing even relatively poor people to buy a Volkswagena coupons-based savings plan through which Germans could order and pay for a KdF car at 990 reichsmarks in weekly bites of just 5 reichsmarks. By 1939, almost 170,000 savings accounts had been opened by people keen to get one.

The scheme, like the whole Nazi project, was ultimately doomed, although the Volkswagen model we all know now as the Beetle did go on to massive success.

Back in 1908, however, the private enterprise of Henry Ford had achieved something very similar. By introducing automation and mass production to the assembly lines of his Detroit plant, he was able to lower the price of his Model Ta rugged, simple car whose huge ground clearance made it ideal for Americas largely unmade roadsso that even the men who built it could afford one. Sales absolutely exploded, and Ford sold fifteen million Model Ts over the next nineteen years.

The Ford Model T was perfectly conceived for Americas rough roads, with high ground clearance and rugged construction. Its design, together with Henry Fords super-efficient mass-manufacture techniques that drove down prices, led to multimillion unit sales.

This small car from Citron, introduced in 1922, was the Type C 5CV; it took account of consumer feedback and so featured an electric starter instead of a starting handle to appeal to the growing band of female drivers.