Mini Cooper Five-door

People at Mini must have been thinking of this for years, specially after BMW started to call the shots. After all, most of Cooper’s great sales performance comes from respecting its style as much as possible, but it was hard to forget that those numbers could get even bigger with not many changes. It was a struggle between tradition and dollars, which only ended when someone figured something like this: “As if Clubman wasn’t enough, we offer Countryman now. So why giving the same extra doors to Cooper had to be so hard?”

Dealing with traditions has become much easier in the car world, because people now work with allusions to the iconic elements of a product, rather than with the literal things. Now it’s possible to combine historical values to all the benefits of the modern life, which for cars appear as safer structures, more comfortable cabin, etc., which is good for both automakers and customers: the first are free to invest on improving the overall quality of their products, and the others get able to enjoy all that. And this is what makes Cooper such a great application of this strategy. You won’t see a single piece in the new vehicle that was shared with the original one, and yet its entire concept was translated. So since 2000 it has been time to enjoy that freedom.

However, as you can see, the five-door variation represented a much smaller change to Cooper’s initial concept than those of its other brothers. Mini’s intention is only to extend its product to families, not creating a new one. Compared to the three-door hatchback, the length grew 161 mm, the wheelbase 72 mm and the height in 11 mm, while the width wasn’t touched. Such stretches gave more room than ever for both passengers and cargo, with the first enjoying 72-mm legroom at the back and the latter a 278-liter trunk. This Cooper reaches 3,98 m of length, 1,73 m of width and 1,42 m of height, but if you can still mistake it for the three-door, looking from the outside, this is only a recognition of how good was Mini’s work.

It’s possible to say that everything else remained untouched. The cabin uses the same circular dashboard, whose infotainmnent central offers the entire plethora of functions and applications and connections that please pretty much all of the customers of this kind of car. And there are all the benefits from BMW’s all-new platform, such as high-quality construction, more comfort and safety equipments than ever and multiple improvements on fuel efficiency. The five-door Cooper will arrive first in United Kingdom, as usual, and in this year’s third trimester. It’ll be produced in the Oxford plant, alongside all the other Mini concoctions, and will have four trim levels, the first one starting at £15,900.

This one doesn’t have a specific name, and uses the brand new three-cylinder 1.5L engine, which reaches 136 hp. But you can drive faster by taking the S version, which uses a four-cylinder 2.0L, produces 192 hp and takes you from 0 to 100 kph in 6.8 seconds. Changing from gasoline to diesel, the D variation uses another three-cylinder 1.5L unit, but capable of 116 hp and more focused on fuel efficiency: it reaches an average of 33.4 kpl and emits 95 g/km of CO₂. The biggest news, however, stand for the SD brother. This one joins the best of two worlds, and uses a four-cylinder 2.0L directed to sportiness. This one offers 170 hp, goes from 0 to 100 kph in 7.4 seconds, makes 29.3 kpl and will cost £20,050.