The Road to My MINI Electric

My Dad's first fancy car was a 1956 Oldsmobile convertible, followed by a 1960 Buick convertible—then he switched to small sports cars: 1962 Sunbeam Alpine Roadster (before Maxwell Smart had a Tiger), 1964 Fiat 1500 Cabriolet (the predecessor to Fiat's 124 Spider), and a 1967 Triumph TR4a (so British!). That's how I grew to appreciate small, tossable sports cars.

In the mid-1960s, My Dad used to take my brother and I to the annual sports car show in the Henry Ford Museum at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. Collectors would bring their sports cars to the museum and the museum would stage them inside. It was probably at that show in 1964 when I saw my first Mini. I thought it was the cutest car I'd ever seen but couldn't understand why it was in a sports-car show. I started reading Road & Track Magazine and found out in that year's Monte Carlo Rally Paddy Hopkirk had driven a Mini to victory over an impressive assortment of larger, more powerful sports cars.

The first sports car I bought was a $180 (unreliable) 1959 Austin-Healey 100-6, then a high-strung (unreliable) 1,600-lb 60-hp Fiat-Abarth OT 1000 Spider (the Fiat 850 Spider equivalent had 48-hp) that was tremendously fun to drive (0-60 in 12.4 seconds). That car set the standard for the rest of my life. I was willing to accept unreliability and moderate acceleration to gain exceptional handling. I wished I could afford Colin Chapman's masterpiece, the Lotus Elan (like Emma Peel drove in The Avengers).

A 1973 Porsche 914-2.0 was my first new car. Its mid-engine configuration and 2,139-lb weight made it tossable; its whopping 95-hp VW engine could take it to 60 mph in 10 seconds. Sadly, it, too, was unreliable, despite its VW origins. I later regretted selling that car to buy the first 1979 Mazda RX-7 in the state. I was fascinated by Mazda's lightweight rotary engine and had high-hopes when they finally put it into a sports car, but the 2,356-lb RX-7 didn't handle as well as my Porsche and was actually slower at 0-60 in 10.4 seconds, despite the lightweight 100-hp rotary-engine.

Overseas Auto Sales, the imported car dealer in Ann Arbor that sold my Dad his sports cars, would once in a while have a used Mini, but they were always expensive and I ended up with a used VW Rabbit. I souped up the engine and had a good-handling car that could get to 60 in about 10 seconds. Not exactly a hot-hatch, but I enjoyed it greatly. One day I visited Overseas and found a Mini-Moke in the showroom—it blew me away! Here was the bare skeleton of the vaunted Mini. I dreamed of getting a Moke and replacing its 850-cc engine with Mini's mighty 1,275-cc engine, and getting some wide, beautiful Minilite magnesium wheels to create the ultimate-handling 1,000-lb Mini. But I couldn't afford that Moke and had nowhere to store a car used only for play. Many years later I bought a very used Morris Mini Moke, but it was the most unreliable car I ever owned and I ended up selling it for parts a decade later.

I'd been an admirer of Honda since they created the neat micro sports-car, the S-600 in 1964, but Honda didn't sell that car in the US. They brought a couple of tiny 2-cylinder coupes to get started here before the ground-breaking Civic. I wished they would make a sports car for the US and they finally did: the CRX. My 1986 CRX Si was incredible. It weighed less than 2,000 lbs and it cornered like it was on rails. I drove it for 12 years until—as Hondas back then were wont to do—it rusted out. Then I bought a used 1991 CRX Si with independent rear suspension and it handled even better than the 1986 model. I don't know how I avoided garnering many speeding tickets.

In January, 1999. Honda brought the VV, an all-aluminum CRX-like hybrid prototype, to the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. It weighed 1,850 lbs, could get to 60 in 10.6 seconds, and achieve an incredible 70 mpg (if driven sensibly). I tried driving my CRX home from the auto show on I-94 without exceeding the 70-mph speed limit. I had to know if I could switch my boy-racer mentality to one of ecolological responsibility. What a strange drive home it was—it was like I was in a different world there in the right-hand lane where semi-trucks would go whizzing by me on the left. The next day I placed my deposit for whatever that car would be called and waited more than a year for delivery. Honda named their first gas-electric hybrid car the Insight.

I could go on about my 20 years driving two gen-1 Honda Insights, but suffice it to say it was a car that rewarded a soft foot on the accelerator, but could corner to maintain momentum due to its light weight. I got 85 mpg on one tankful, but other hypermilers could do much better—I never came close to the 143 mpg/tankful one group achieved at an average of 18 mph.

Meanwhile, in 2009, nearly a decade after BMW acquired MINI, the all-electric MINI-E appeared. Of course, living in Michigan, I could't get one of the 500 leases on a MINI-E, but here was a car that could embody both my ecological and hot-hatch penchants. I waited for the production model, but instead BMW used their EV R&D to bring forth the BMW i3 electric car. It was too expensive for me and not really a hot hatch.

Finally, rumors of a production version of the MINI-E surfaced in 2018. Test mules began being spotted on the roads. In July, 2019, MINI unveiled the MINI Cooper SE (which suddenly sprouted a fake hood scoop the pre-production prototypes didn't include). Of course, MINI of Ann Arbor knew nothing about the SE except what I told them. They were more interested in selling cars they could actually obtain. They finally let me place my deposit in August. My Insight's battery died and I replaced it (all of 70 lbs) myself. Then I sold my Insight to a collector in Akron and waited for what I expected would be a few months for my SE to arrive.

Thanks to the pandemic, the few months turned into a week short of a year. The day after my happy delivery day was a sad day because MINI of Ann Arbor—a dealership I could walk to—went out of business. It's good that my SE doesn't require frequent service because now my closest MINI dealership, Motor City MINI, is 40 miles away.

It's easy to understand how this little car that can rocket to 60 in about 6.2 seconds was impressive after a life of cars that took 10 seconds to get to that speed. And the handling! I'd never had a car with summer performance tires and the summer performance tires on my SE were also wider than the tires on any other of my previous sporty cars. Some SE owners have opted for even stickier rubber, but I can't imagine I'd be able to tell the difference because I never exceed the traction of my Hankooks.

This was my first sporty car without a stick shift—would I miss it? No! The SE's stepless acceleration from 0 to top speed is the what cars should do—ICE-car transmissions are just a crutch that drivers have come to accept and even rhapsodize about.

The quality of construction is exceptional. I've found no assembly defects and in 19 months there are still no rattles. I really like MINI's old-fashioned switches and buttons. I can find them without having to search through a menu on a touch-screen to activate important features.

In 2019, after placing my order, I wrote many letters to MINI, begging to pay $1,500 extra to get a less-expensive base MINI Cooper hood that didn't include the non-functional, ornamental, marketing-imposed (I learned this in a letter from MINI's head designer) hood scoop. My letters to Germany, Britain, and MINI US didn't persuade MINI to make an exception for me and my SE came with a hood scoop. So I purchased a base MINI Cooper hood and a week after taking delivery of my SE, I had a local body shop paint and install the scoopless hood:

Some scoff at the SE because it's based on BMW's UKL 1 platform that first came to market in 2013, but the F56 is a very competent sporty car—I'd say “sports car,” but I reserve that label for 2-seaters. Some scoff at the SE because its EPA-rated range is only 110-114 miles per charge. However, increasing the range would have increased the car's weight, increased the car's cost, and decreased the car's interior space. As you know by now, weight is very important to me, so I appreciate being able to own the lightest EV on the market and the fact that it's based on the fun-to-drive F56 made this the obvious car for me.

Indeed, I have a twice-monthly 50-mile drive on twisty country roads. After 19 months of driving my SE on this trip, my smile muscles are stronger and no longer hurt when I get home.

On one of those drives I saw a McLaren super-car sitting in the opposite lane, stopped. I later realized the driver was probably waiting for traffic ahead of him to leave space for him to blast down the road at incredible speeds I could never approach in my SE with its 93-mph top-end. My smile grew as I realized I was having more fun than the McLaren driver because I was driving a "slow" car fast rather than being forced to sit and wait in the middle of the road for a chance to drive a fast car fast. That driver was hoping to enjoy perhaps all of 60 dangerous seconds when he wouldn't be driving his fast car slow.

After 50 years of owning cars, I'm so glad the perfect car for me became available a few years before someone will find it necessary to pry my hands off the steering wheel, confiscate my key fob, and yell my driving days are over.

John Johnson, March, 2022