The Wheel Deal thinks the MINI 5 Door is the product of a MINI mid-life crisis. It writes, in part:
The Mini is trying to be bigger to make room for your wife and kids, but with minimal success, writes The Wheel Deal
There comes a time in your life when you have to wave goodbye and move on. Like when you slip past 32 and one day realise, quite reasonably, that those wild weekends of nightclub debauchery must come to an end. The partying. The liquid indulgence. The waking up next to yet another “what’s-her-name-again”.
While you are caught in the painful throngs of a two-day hangover (your liver ain’t what it used to be) the costs of a hedonistic life will prey on your mind until they incite a sudden snap change.
“It’s time to grow up,” you’ll mutter under your breath, “to get real and trade revelry for responsibility.” So you decide to make your aged parents proud by getting that good job, wooing the nice girl and selflessly delivering a pair of grandchildren. A whole new era will begin. One in which your old Mini Cooper S will surely have no place. You’ll need to stick it up on Gumtree and use the proceeds to garage something larger that can better cope with strollers and milky baby sick.
This scenario has long been the elephant trapped inside the Mini marketing room. Because, let’s face it, when you build a two-and-a-dwarf-seater hatchback intended mostly for self-indulgent road fun, your target market is pretty much limited to the young and the single (or in some cases the recently divorced — but that’s a whole different story).<
