MotoringFile Most liked posts in thread: A MINI Sedan? It’s Officially on the Table

It's no skin off my bones as long as they keep making the two door hard top.

 

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.

 

To have the sedan in the larger segment it would have to be on the Clubman

 

This brand is becoming a joke. And not just one about "labels".

 

Flush the sedan idea. Let's see a production version of the Rocketman.

 

He doesn't have to go any further than the '75 Cadillac Fleetwood for inspiration.

 

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.

 

BMW already makes the 1 Series.

 

This might be the point where I even give up defending the brand. :nonod:

 

Its getting tougher to do.

 

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"...

 

Thank you!

 

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:

 

Hatchbacks rule.

 

Bingo.

Eric for prez.

 

I agree with Eric except that I don't think a stripped down MINI would compete with the GP at all, and only slightly with the JCW. The GP3 will be very expensive, and has all the performance bells and whistles BMW is willing to throw at it. It's really not a platform for modding so much as a finished product. The stripped down version could be optioned and modded to one's heart's content, over time, and still be substantially cheaper than a GP, provided the aftermarket embraced it (or was able to embrace it, depending on what MINI does with the car). The price points between the two are so extreme I think you'd see very little cross shopping. The JCW would obviously fall somewhere in between.

I would love to see it. It won't happen though; BMW has a different business model in mind for MINI, and rather than encourage the aftermarket business they've instead tried to become the aftermarket go to for the MINI, first by buying the JCW name, then by coming up with a plethora of options that used to be in the aftermarket's domain.

They've already jumped the shark (and ironically made a MINI that looks like a fish along the way), there's no going back.