Auto News Caught up with Peter Schwarzenbauer, BMW board member in charge of MINI and asked about the progress of a 5th model. Mr....The post A MINI Sedan? It’s Officially on the Table appeared first on MotoringFile. (visit MotoringFile for the full article) More...
Wow, another flip, or is this a flop. Schwarzenbauer sounds like he would make a great American politician.
The surprises keep coming from this premium car company and the best part is that they didn't mention which platform they would use for this debacle.
They need to spend less time making new models and perfect what they have. Starting with the engines. Reliable power will help this brand much more than more/bigger models. The reviews for MINI's especially the new ones are horrible when it comes to reliability.
The writing is on the wall that this would replace the Superleggera halo car idea. Having a premium, high-priced roadster as a halo car might be a mistake, anyway. The temptation for BMW is to manage each brand as a silo, applying the same strategy for each (bread-and-butter moneymaker model, some specialty models, and a high-priced halo car). What they should do instead is to approach MINI as an anomaly and not try to create an overpriced, front wheel drive Miata. They should maximize what has won for them in the past: take the F56 S and make a lightweight stripper model geared toward the enthusiast. It would be a relatively easy engineering task with only a few new parts to design. They could sell it as a clubsport model (MINI Cooper cS) with a MSRP of $23,999 and a weight of 2600 lbs. with very limited options. It would eat into GP3 sales, but meh, this could be a much bigger volume car, and bring back what has won for MINI in the past.
Well.... Heh Heh Heh.... You just know it will also come in the JCW and the GP variant... I seem to recall it wasn't too long ago that MINI thought they had too many models and that's why they got rid of the "Twins"...
Though interestingly they have never made a sedan 1-series, maybe because they mostly sell it in Europe where small sedans are unfashionable, so the 1-series exists only in 3- and 5-door hatchback form: