A MINI MARVEL
The best things come in small packages... and this is a cracker
THE first all-electric car I drove was a MINI, back in 2009. It never was destined for production. Instead, it was the prototype for what parent company BMW referred to at the time as its new city car.
A limited number (I have 200 in my head) were produced and dispersed across the UK to real-world guinea pigs to assess how such a car would fit in with everyday lifestyles. That data, alongside many other inputs, was used to create the BMW i3, and that was the end of the all-electric MINI.
It was a shame, because I drove it on country roads in the southeast of England from the media base in Farnborough, and it was the most tremendous fun. MINIs always deliver that legendary go-kart feel when you drive one, but when overlaid with the effortless linear acceleration of what effectively was a souped-up dodgem car, it was irresistible.
All these years later, MINI has returned to electric, or at least the halfway house of hybrid. This Countryman is a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV), capable of travelling 42km on electric power only, and for people with modest daily commutes, or those who just do the school run, that surely has a lot of appeal.
For the rest of us, though, the fun comes when the combustion engine and electric motor work in tandem to produce sparkling acceleration that wouldn’t otherwise be possible from just a three-cylinder 1.5-litre 136hp engine.
In cars with low physical profiles, you always feel like you’re driving faster than actually is the case, but here it’s no illusion. This little beauty leaves the blocks like a 100m sprinter and hits 100kph in just 6.8 seconds, and it plasters a smile on your face as you do so.
Very close to my house, there’s a bridge over a stream that defies the usual convention and actually sits in a dip in the road after a deceptively testing and very poorly cambered curve in the approach that longs to push you left, so it’s pretty much the inverse of the usual arch bridge configuration. It’s a nuisance in snow, and has been a bit of a graveyard when there’s any ice around at all, but when it’s dry and dusty, and you hit it at the right speed, it’s exhilarating.
It’s something of a touchstone for me in all the test cars. Those that get through it as if they’re on rails get a pass, while those that drift bear further scrutiny to check just how stable the ride and handling are. The MINI Countryman, with all-wheel drive, aced the test, and I’d love to have tried hitting it even harder were it not for the fact that I have to be mindful there often are children playing in the area.
In fact, everything about this hybrid feels just like a standard MINI when it comes to the fun quotient. In looks, it’s little different to the standard car, though the big yellow disc with a silver E symbol over the charging port leaves you in no doubt it’s at least partly electric.
There’s a small compromise inside too, with 26 millimetres less headroom in the rear and 17 litres less cargo space than in the standard Countryman to accommodate the battery.
The upshot of it all is that the car comes with a claimed fuel consumption of just 2.1 litres per 100km in the combined urban and extra-urban driving cycles, and emissions of just 51g/km, for annual motor tax of €170. Electric charging is possible from a standard three-pin socket, though higher voltage chargers greatly reduce the amount of time it takes to top up the battery.
There are three drive modes – Auto eDrive, Max eDrive and Save Battery – though I just let it do its own thing, with the infotainment screen offering graphics to show exactly what electric power was being drained or regenerated at any given time.
As always with any car in the BMW family, you can spend a lot on extras, and the base price of my test car, €44,730, levitated to €55,342.85 after a heap of options – 18-inch wheels, automatic tailgate, satnav, wireless phone charging, heated sports seats, darkened rear glass and so on – had been added.
That’s a hell of a lot of money, and this sort of fun is available from much cheaper cars in the MINI line-up, but if you really are conscious of the environment and want to make a difference without having to endure any significant variation in performance, the Countryman PHEV has a lot going for it.