Mini Cooper - arrived!

Ha! Yes I expect so.

Last night I figured out how to change the interior lighting colour (button on the ceiling (obviously). Nothing against neon purple, but it’s not my first choice. You can choose between a number of different colours and so now it’s electric blue. Or at least until Mrs RT gets in and decides on something else!

I have the electric blue but sometimes I switch to the orange so everything matches.

We have kids. It’s whatever colour they’ve left it after pissing around with the toggle switch.

Eva has a pleasant orange at the moment but Green and White is also a favourite of mine.

They haven't changed for everyone....  My eldest two have the OK to adjust their own seats inc heating/cooling, but they still wouldn't touch anything else without checking.  Even my two year old is getting it, but as the child lock switch also locks out the seat controls, there isn't anything he can do.

Blue is a good choice.  I started with traditional orange on the 7 (white upper zone) but quickly moved to white/blue and stuck with that.  There are 3 zones on my current car, top of the A pillars like a MINI, door panel/dashboard and footwell/doorbins/central storage.  There are a huge amount of choices and you can set each zone differently, but they are all set to blue. 

Re Voodoo lights working when driving on the right, I didn't get the opportunity with the 7, but the 5 went to France a couple of times and the Voodoo lights worked as they did at home. 

Well Orange goes down well in Belfast…….

(Ducks for cover)

To clarify: if I left Eva’s lights in “drive on the left” then the Voodoo lights would operate as expected. However their dipped position would blind everyone regardless or the Voodoo bit would leave me driving in the semi dark.

In the iDrive there is an option to tell the car I’m “driving on the right” and the manual is quite honest that selection of this option means the full Voodoo will not work (so I can’t drive behind cars with main beam and the dark patches etc.). I might just say fuck it when I drive to Lake Garda next weekend before going on to France and leave the lights to blind these foreigners - because obviously it’s not me that foreign….. 😆

Maybe I left it as was and assumed the Voodoo functionality would stop any blinding, whatever I did worked and I didn't get flashed.   I don't ever remember seeing a French car with beam adapters, so I'd just leave as is!

In my current car, the manual says they have a beam pattern that eliminate the need to adjust the headlights for driving abroad and the Voodoo functionality (AKA Adaptive driving Beam) will work.  That's for the standard Matrix lights, mine has Pixel LEDs which splits the beam both horizontally / vertically and has triple the number of LEDs.  

I'm sure it will be fine.  

As the right hand side of the road will be empty, it will fill that with light, so the dipped beam being to the left won't be an issue and part of that beam will switch off if there's a car coming the other way. 

Some thoughts after a month or so of Mini ownership. It’s great on the motorway - feels planted and secure, and generally grown-up, and certainly with just me in the car, the engine is muscular enough to pull in sixth above 70, even on an incline without changing down, unless you really need to charge off. That sixth ratio also means that the revs are kept down at an mway cruise - c.2,500 revs. You can bat down the fast lane in it without feeling remotely out of place.

It’s not a fast car but the performance is well-judged - the mid-range punch is pleasingly strong and there’s just enough to keep you interested - putting in some effort with the gears is rewarding and you can have fun without the risk of being arrested. That said, it is easy to find yourself going too fast, because it has an eager nature.

Talking of ratios, it’s nice to drive a car with a long first gear. The Fiat has a very short first gear, so you swap up to second pretty much straight after pulling away, even in traffic. Whereas the Mini can actually be driven in first gear.

It’s pleasingly economical - it’s only got 1200 miles on the clock at present (so haven’t taken the revs beyond the mid-3s) - but out of curiosity I zeroed the readout for my trip back from Dorset to London (via Heathrow to collect my wife) and by the time we got home, which included time stuck in an unholy snarl getting from T5 back into central London thanks to the M25/M4 junction being closed, the MPG readout was c.54mpg. Or to look at it another way, it was about a 200 mile round journey and the car is still showing between 1/2 and 2/3rds of a tank remaining.

More interestingly, it’s indeed a joy to drive on the twisties. The New Forest is not driving heaven thanks to low speed limits and the ever present risk of mid-road ponies around every corner, but you nevertheless can feel that the car is agile, has whipcrack turn-in, and nicely weighted and positioned controls. Then on the way back, thanks to heavy traffic in roadworks on the M3, the navigation system diverted me on to part of the old Portsmouth Rd, which has some fast sweeping sections. The car flows really well on such roads - third gear is a cracker - and whilst 136bhp is not much when you’re used to nearly three times that amount, if you plan ahead, you can get decent overtakes in even without troubling the upper rev range (out of deference to the engine’s newness).

It’s also great to have a small car that shares nearly all the FG my car has and that works the same way, and even has some that mine lacks. The heated windscreen in particular is great - nice to be able to demist without needing the aircon on full blast. The headlights are pretty powerful too for such a small car.

Negatives? I’m never going to love the colour much, the ride is a touch firm (but well damped - it thumps in a well-padded sort of way and is way better than my mother’s Countryman Cooper S, whose ride feels more brittle), and the windows create a lot of turbulence and noise when open, meaning that it’s even more of a pity not to have a sunroof, but apart from that it’s brilliant.

Agree with your thoughts. Ours feels really planted on the motorway and can be cruised along at god speeds. And even on a twisty at low speed it just feels fun.

The Mini has always driven like a little BMW and felt like a quality small car.   I first drove one back in 2001, red Cooper which belonged to my ex-BIL.   I haven't driven one of the current models, but have experienced all variants of the R56 apart from the Works GP and even the basic First was fun to drive, better than the Cooper S in some ways as it didn't suffer from torque steer.  I've only bought/owned one, but the ex Mrs Martin is on her 4th in 10 years, so I know where some of the maintenance is going......

When are you taking it to Italy? You're doing a bit of 'a Jeff' at the moment..... buying a LHD car for continental trips and running around the South of England in it instead!

So the Mini made it down to Italy pre-Christmas and then back up to Courmayeur in the Alps over NYE before heading back to its new berth at our place in Le Marche. And while I am duty-bound to say that whilst no, it wasn’t quite as effortless and comfortable a Trans-European Express as the 440i, it was miles better on the long motorway slog across France than you’d ever credit, and really there was precious little to complain about. It was quiet, comfortable, capable, decently economical, surprisingly capacious, and blessed with excellent headlights (I had the LHD ones swapped back on before leaving London). I saw minus 13 on the autoroute near Strasbourg on one point in the early evening and yet inside all was toasty and cosseted calm.

After now back home (by plane) in the UK, after several weeks and circa 3,000 miles of driving, I can reconfirm that it really is a super little car. It’s ideal for negotiating the narrow streets of medieval Italian towns, fun to drive out of town, drives as imperiously as any normal “big” car on the motorway and has pretty much all the FG you could want (it feels very upmarket and smart inside - no sense of being in a “cheap” car). It’s not what you’d call fast, but the engine is surprisingly throaty-sounding and it has enough power to reward a bit of thrashing. It attracts no undue attention other than smiles.

It’s now on a set of Bridgestone Blizzak winter tyres and my wife, who is still down there, took it for its first service at the local main dealer today (due on time elapsed), which took two hours while she waited and was uneventful.

A few snaps from the past weeks follow:

What was the snow like? I've read a few horror stories about snowless resorts in the Alps.

Actually ok in that part of the Alps - we usually drive over to La Thuile (1450m) for the day to actually ski as it’s infinitely more and better skiing than Courmayeur itself (1200m), which majors more on fancy boutiques and Eurotrash mincing around holding very small dogs in coats than anything resembling actual skiing. From La Thuile, you can ski into France (La Rosiere).