ONES WE FOUND
Audi A1 Sportback 30 TFSI Sport, 12,000 miles, £16,995
2018 2018
Mini 5dr Cooper Sport, 10,000 miles, £15,000
the Mini to be the better car in corners, right? Well no, not quite. The Mini has good body control, it’s true, so it feels well tied down when the road rises and falls, but its steering feels disconnected, especially around and just off the straight-ahead. The A1 has more grip in corners than the Mini, too, along with steering that’s more feelsome and predictable. So, despite the fact that it leans more in corners, it generally inspires far more confidence.
Both cars have a good driving position, although some of our testers found the Mini’s seat lacked under-thigh support, and its pedals are offset to the right. While both cars have a great range of adjustment, the Mini’s driver’s seat drops lower and its steering wheel extends farther. We also like the Mini’s simple instrument cluster, which moves up or down with the steering wheel and features a useful digital data display.
Being based on BMW’S idrive, the Mini’s infotainment system is as good as it gets, being easy to use via a rotary controller by the gearlever. A 6.5in screen was standard, with a larger, 8.8in one offered as part of a £2000 Navigation Plus Pack. This is well worth having if you can find a Mini equipped with it, although they’re relatively rare.
In this generation of A1, the rotary controller that appeared in earlier Audis was dropped in favour of an 8.8in touchscreen, which is more distracting to operate on the move. However, it’s sharp and responsive and its menus are reasonably logical to navigate.
You can see out of the Mini more easily, because its more upright windscreen pillars obscure your vision less through corners and roundabouts, while its thinner rear pillars don’t hide things as much as the A1’s do when you’re reversing. Both cars come with rear parking sensors to assist in this respect.
The Mini’s interior design is more exuberant than the A1’s and you can’t fault its fit and finish, with materials that look plush and feel the part when you prod them. The A1’s quality is fine for this class, but it keeps soft-touch materials to the absolute minimum and in some ways doesn’t feel as upmarket as the first generation of the car did.
SPACE AND PRACTICALITY
Front space, rear space, seating exibility, boot
No small car betters the Mini for front leg room, but the A1 is good enough. Both have plenty of head room, but you sit a little closer to your front passenger in the Mini.
For storing paraphernalia, the Mini’s rather meagre door bins and shortage of oddment trays place it second to the A1. Both have a decent-sized glovebox, though.
The A1 doesn’t have the roomiest rear in the class, but it’ll seat a couple of six-footers behind their equivalents. Head room is marginally better in the Mini, but getting in is an act of contortion through the narrow rear door apertures. And once you’ve managed that, the Sport model’s thicker front seats make rear leg room a bit tight. What’s more, the Mini is in effect a four-seater, due to its higher central floor hump and narrower rear bench, while the A1 can carry five at a push.
The A1 has a bigger boot, swallowing five carry-on suitcases to the Mini’s four. However, find a Mini equipped with the Comfort Pack option and it comes with a height-adjustable boot floor that you can hinge up and clip onto the rear seats. This gives you some added useful space beneath it for bulkier objects, and it’s complemented by rear seatbacks that can be locked in a more upright position to increase cargo capacity while still allowing passengers to use them.
BUYING AND OWNING
Costs, equipment, reliability, safety and security
New, the Mini would have cost you more, but two years down the track it’s the cheaper of our contenders by £2500. The Mini is also slightly thirstier, according to the official WLTP figures,
at 47.9mpg against the A1’s 48.7mpg, and it’s pricier to service. Both should cost about the same to insure and tax; being registered after the changes of April 2017 came into force, both will cost a flat rate of £145 a year for road tax. All up, the A1 will cost you less to run in the long term, largely due to its stronger residual values.
You get more kit for your cash in the Mini, though. In Sport trim, it comes with goodies such as 17in wheels, climate control and heated seats, whereas you’d have had to pay extra for all of those when the A1 was new.
Compare safety features, though, and it’s the Mini that looks stingy. While the A1 comes with automatic emergency braking and lanekeeping assistance as standard, you’d have had to spend £800 on the Driving Assistant Pack to get these safety aids on a new Mini. The Mini isn’t rated very highly by Euro NCAP, either, managing just four stars out of five in its safety tests way back in 2014, whereas the A1 got the full five stars just last year.
In the most recent What Car? Reliability Survey, the Mini finished mid-table in the small car class, while the previous generation of the A1 (this latest one didn’t feature) came 20th out of 25 cars. Audi as a brand ranked a slightly disappointing 20th out of 31 manufacturers in the same survey, while Mini was a more commendable eighth.