City of dreams: a more a‡ordable Mini Clubman
THIS MONTH Mini has been rummaging through its regularly ransacked catalogue of old model names again and come up with the ingenious City, the only Clubman to sneak below the £20k mark. Designed with leet drivers in mind, the £19,995 City undercuts the Cooper by £1090 in its cheapest form but still comes with cruise control, navigation, rear parking sensors and Apple CarPlay as standard.
The inevitable downsides include a downgrade from the Cooper’s 17inch wheels to tiddly 16s but the big dierence comes under the bonnet. Like the Cooper you can have diesel or petrol power, but both are massively detuned. So instead of our 1499cc Clubman’s 134bhp, the City makes only 101bhp and the 062mph time swells from 9.2sec to a dreary 11.3sec. Still, that’s better than the 24-odd seconds it took an original 850 City back in 1980. Progress.
Despite the drop in power and performance the City posts the same 131g/km CO2 igure as the Cooper and an identical 48.7mpg. We haven’t matched that yet, our best tankful so far being 45mpg on a really gentle motorway run, with quicker journeys returning nearer 37mpg. Through the city – or the hamlets that are the nearest we have to cities in rural Devon – economy drops to around 32mpg.
Must try harder… both of us.